English

On the irrationality of certain super-polynomially decaying series

Number Theory 2025-11-05 v1 Classical Analysis and ODEs

Abstract

We give a negative answer to a question by Paul Erd\H{o}s and Ronald Graham on whether the series n=11(n+1)(n+2)(n+f(n)) \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{1}{(n+1)(n+2)\cdots(n+f(n))} has an irrational sum whenever (f(n))n=1(f(n))_{n=1}^{\infty} is a sequence of positive integers converging to infinity. To achieve this, we generalize a classical observation of S\={o}ichi Kakeya on the set of all subsums of a convergent positive series. We also discuss why the same problem is likely difficult when (f(n))n=1(f(n))_{n=1}^{\infty} is additionally assumed to be increasing.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.18712,
  title  = {On the irrationality of certain super-polynomially decaying series},
  author = {Tonći Crmarić and Vjekoslav Kovač},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.18712},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

11 pages, 2 figures