English

Quadratic sequences with prime power discriminators

Number Theory 2022-10-10 v2 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

The discriminator of an integer sequence s=(s(i))i0\textbf{s} = (s(i))_{i \geq 0}, introduced by Arnold, Benkoski, and McCabe in 1985, is the function Ds(n)D_{\textbf{s}} (n) that sends nn to the least integer mm such that the numbers s(0),s(1),,s(n1)s(0), s(1), \ldots, s(n - 1) are pairwise incongruent modulo mm. In this note, we try to determine all quadratic sequences whose discriminator is given by plogpnp^{\lceil \log_p n \rceil} for prime pp, i.e., the smallest power of pp which is n\geq n. We determine all such sequences for p=2p = 2, show that there are none for p5p \geq 5, and provide some partial results for p=3p = 3.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.03265,
  title  = {Quadratic sequences with prime power discriminators},
  author = {Sajed Haque},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.03265},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

22 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T00:53:38.846Z