Related papers: Practical pretenders

A set of integers is \emph{primitive} if it does not contain an element dividing another. Denote by $f(n)$ the number of maximum-size primitive subsets of $\{1,\ldots, 2n\}$. We prove that the limit $\alpha=\lim_{n\rightarrow…

Counting the number of prime numbers up to a certain natural number and describing the asymptotic behavior of such a counting function has been studied by famous mathematicians like Gauss, Legendre, Dirichlet, and Euler. The prime number…

Fix a positive real number $\theta$. The natural numbers $m$ with largest square-free divisor not exceeding $m^\theta$ form a set $\mathscr{A}$, say. It is shown that whenever $\theta>1/2$ then all large natural numbers $n$ are the sum of…

Let $F(X)= \prod_{i=1}^k(a_iX+b_i)$ be a polynomial with $a_i, b_i$ being integers. Suppose the discriminant of $F$ is non-zero and $F$ is admissible. Given any natural number $N$, let $S(F,N)$ denotes those integers less than or equal to…

The multiplicative theory of a set of numbers (which could be natural, integer, rational, real or complex numbers) is the first-order theory of the structure of that set with (solely) the multiplication operation (that set is taken to be…

We prove that there exist arbitrarily small positive real numbers $\epsilon$ such that every integral power $(1 + \vepsilon)^n$ is at a distance greater than $2^{-17} \epsilon |\log \vepsilon|^{-1}$ to the set of rational integers. This is…

For a word $S$, let $f(S)$ be the largest integer $m$ such that there are two disjoints identical (scattered) subwords of length $m$. Let $f(n, \Sigma) = \min \{f(S): S \text{is of length} n, \text{over alphabet} \Sigma \}$. Here, it is…

This paper presents a formalization of the theory of amicable numbers in the Lean~4 proof assistant. Two positive integers $m$ and $n$ are called an amicable pair if the sum of proper divisors of $m$ equals $n$ and the sum of proper…

We study the set $\mathcal{S}$ of odd positive integers $n$ with the property ${2n}/{\sigma(n)} - 1 = 1/x$, for positive integer $x$, i.e., the set that relates to odd perfect and odd "spoof perfect" numbers. As a consequence, we find that…

We fix a gap in our proof of an upper bound for the number of positive integers $n\le x$ for which the Euler function $\varphi(n)$ has all prime factors at most $y$. While doing this we obtain a stronger, likely best-possible result.

For each positive integer $n$, we denote by $\omega^*(n)$ the number of shifted-prime divisors $p-1$ of $n$, i.e., \[\omega^*(n):=\sum_{p-1\mid n}1.\] First introduced by Prachar in 1955, this function has interesting applications in…

We show that, for any $r\geq 1$, if $g_1,\ldots,g_r$ are distinct coprime integers, sufficiently large depending only on $r$, then for any $\epsilon>0$ there are infinitely many integers $n$ such that all but $\epsilon \log n$ of the digits…

In this paper we study the distribution of the real algebraic numbers. Given an interval $I$, a positive integer $n$ and $Q>1$, define the counting function $\Phi_n(Q;I)$ to be the number of algebraic numbers in $I$ of degree $n$ and height…

For a positive integer $n$, let $g(n)$ denote the infimum of all real numbers $L$ such that there exists a multiplicative Sidon set $A\subseteq\{1,2,\dots,n\}$ that intersects every interval $[x,x+L]\subseteq[1,n]$. S\'ark\"ozy asked for…

We study how well a real number can be approximated by sums of two or more rational numbers with denominators up to a certain size.

Given $k, \ell \in {\bf N}^+$, let $x_{i,j}$ be, for $1 \le i \le k$ and $0 \le j \le \ell$, some fixed integers, and define, for every $n \in {\bf N}^+$, $s_n := \sum_{i=1}^k \prod_{j=0}^\ell x_{i,j}^{n^j}$. We prove that the following are…

For any positive integer $p\geq 3$, let $A$ be a proper subset of $\{0,1,\ldots, p-1\}$ with $\sharp A=s\geq 2$. Suppose $h: \{0,1,\ldots,s-1\}\to A$ is a one-to-one map which is strictly increasing with $A=\{h(0),h(1),\ldots,h(s-1)\}$. We…

A real number is called left-computable if there exists a computable increasing sequence of rational numbers converging to it. In this article we are investigating a proper subset of the left-computable numbers. We say that a real number…

Every positive rational number has representations as Egyptian fractions (sums of reciprocals of distinct positive integers) with arbitrarily many terms and with arbitrarily large denominators. However, such representations normally use a…

A positive integer $n$ is called an abundant number if $\sigma (n)\ge 2n$, where $\sigma (n)$ is the sum of all positive divisors of $n$. Let $E(x)$ be the largest number of consecutive abundant numbers not exceeding $x$. In 1935, P. Erd\H…