English

Results and conjectures related to a conjecture of Erd\H{o}s concerning primitive sequences

Number Theory 2017-11-28 v2

Abstract

A strictly increasing sequence A\mathscr{A} of positive integers is said to be primitive if no term of A\mathscr{A} divides any other. Erd\H{o}s showed that the series aA1aloga\sum_{a \in \mathscr{A}} \frac{1}{a \log a}, where A\mathscr{A} is a primitive sequence different from {1}\{1\}, are all convergent and their sums are bounded above by an absolute constant. Besides, he conjectured that the upper bound of the preceding sums is reached when A\mathscr{A} is the sequence of the prime numbers. The purpose of this paper is to study the Erd\H{o}s conjecture. In the first part of the paper, we give two significant conjectures which are equivalent to that of Erd\H{o}s and in the second one, we study the series of the form aA1a(loga+x)\sum_{a \in \mathscr{A}} \frac{1}{a (\log a + x)}, where xx is a fixed non-negative real number and A\mathscr{A} is a primitive sequence different from {1}\{1\}. In particular, we prove that the analogue of Erd\H{o}s's conjecture for those series does not hold, at least for x363x \geq 363. At the end of the paper, we propose a more general conjecture than that of Erd\H{o}s, which concerns the preceding series, and we conclude by raising some open questions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1709.08708,
  title  = {Results and conjectures related to a conjecture of Erd\H{o}s concerning primitive sequences},
  author = {Bakir Farhi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.08708},
  year   = {2017}
}

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11 pages