English

Upper bounds on the solutions to $n = p+m^2$

Number Theory 2012-04-10 v7

Abstract

Hardy and Littlewood conjectured that every large integer nn that is not a square is the sum of a prime and a square. They believed that the number R(n)\mathcal{R}(n) of such representations for n=p+m2n = p+m^2 is asymptotically given by \mathcal{R}(n) \sim \frac{\sqrt{n}}{\log n}\prod_{p=3}^{\infty}(1-\frac{1}{p-1}(\frac{n}{p})), where pp is a prime, mm is an integer, and (np)(\frac{n}{p}) denotes the Legendre symbol. Unfortunately, as we will later point out, this conjecture is difficult to prove and not \emph{all} integers that are nonsquares can be represented as the sum of a prime and a square. Instead in this paper we prove two upper bounds for R(n)\mathcal{R}(n) for nNn \le N. The first upper bound applies to \emph{all} nNn \le N. The second upper bound depends on the possible existence of the Siegel zero, and assumes its existence, and applies to all N/2<nNN/2 < n \le N but at most N1δ1\ll N^{1-\delta_1} of these integers, where NN is a sufficiently large positive integer and 0<δ10.0000250< \delta_1 \le 0.000025.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1004.0536,
  title  = {Upper bounds on the solutions to $n = p+m^2$},
  author = {Aran Nayebi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1004.0536},
  year   = {2012}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T15:06:19.132Z