English

On Eswarathasan--Levine and Boyd's conjectures for harmonic numbers

Number Theory 2025-03-21 v1

Abstract

We provide numerical evidence towards three conjectures on harmonic numbers by Eswarathasan--Levine and Boyd. Let JpJ_p denote the set of integers n1n\geq 1 such that the harmonic number HnH_n is divisible by a prime pp. The conjectures state that: (i)(i) JpJ_p is always finite and of the order O(p2(loglogp)2+ϵ)O(p^2(\log\log p)^{2+\epsilon}); (ii)(ii) the set of primes for which JpJ_p is minimal (called harmonic primes) has density e1e^{-1} among all primes; (iii)(iii) no harmonic number is divisible by p4p^4. We prove (i)(i) and (iii)(iii) for all p16843p\leq 16843 with at most one exception, and enumerate harmonic primes up to~5010550\cdot 10^5, finding a proportion close to the expected density. Our work extends previous computations by Boyd by a factor of about 3030 and 5050, respectively.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.15714,
  title  = {On Eswarathasan--Levine and Boyd's conjectures for harmonic numbers},
  author = {Leonardo Carofiglio and Giacomo Cherubini and Alessandro Gambini},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.15714},
  year   = {2025}
}