Related papers: A Threshold for the Best Two-term Underapproximati…

An increasing sequence $(x_i)_{i=1}^n$ of positive integers is an $n$-term Egyptian underapproximation of $\theta \in (0,1]$ if $\sum_{i=1}^n \frac{1}{x_i} < \theta$. A greedy algorithm constructs an $n$-term underapproximation of $\theta$.…

Let $0 < \theta \leqslant 1$. A sequence of positive integers $(b_n)_{n=1}^\infty$ is called a weak greedy approximation of $\theta$ if $\sum_{n=1}^{\infty}1/b_n = \theta$. We introduce the weak greedy approximation algorithm (WGAA), which,…

This paper studies the greedy two-term underapproximation of $\theta\in (0,1]$ using reciprocals of numbers from a Fibonacci-type sequence $(c_n)_{n=1}^\infty$. We find the set of $\theta$ whose greedy two-term underapproximation is the…

Erd\H{o}s and Graham found it conceivable that the best $n$-term Egyptian underapproximation of almost every positive number for sufficiently large $n$ gets constructed in a greedy manner, i.e., from the best $(n-1)$-term Egyptian…

An Egyptian fraction is a sum of distinct unit fractions (reciprocals of positive integers). We show that every rational number has Egyptian fraction representations where the number of terms is of the same order of magnitude as the largest…

Building upon previous works of Andr{\'e} and Chudnovsky, we prove a general result concerning the approximations of values at rational points a/b of any G-function F with rational Taylor coefficients by fractions of the form n/(B…

Let $G\cong \mathbb Z/m_1\mathbb Z\times\ldots\times \mathbb Z/m_r\mathbb Z$ be a finite abelian group with $m_1\mid\ldots\mid m_r=\exp(G)$. The $n$-term subsums version of Kneser's Theorem, obtained either via the DeVos-Goddyn-Mohar…

Let G be a finite additive abelian group with exponent exp(G)=n>1 and let A be a nonempty subset of {1,...,n-1}. In this paper, we investigate the smallest positive integer $m$, denoted by s_A(G), such that any sequence {c_i}_{i=1}^m with…

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…

Let $n,d$, and $k$ be positive integers where $n$ and $d$ are coprime. Our two main results are Theorem 1. There is a partition of the infinite interval $[kd,\infty)$ of positive integers into a family of finite sets $X$ for which the sum…

An Egyptian fraction is a sum of the form $1/n_1 + \cdots + 1/n_r$ where $n_1, \dots, n_k$ are distinct positive integers. We prove explicit lower bounds for the cardinality of the set $E_N$ of rational numbers that can be represented by…

In the Shortest Common Superstring problem, one needs to find the shortest superstring for a set of strings. This problem is APX-hard, and many approximation algorithms were proposed, with the current best approximation factor of 2.466.…

We present a special-purpose algorithm for factoring semiprimes $N = pq$ in which one prime factor satisfies $p \approx c\,(a/b)^n$ for positive integers $a, b, c, n$ with $a > b$ and $\gcd(a,b) = 1$. Given the correct parameters $(a, b)$,…

In this paper we consider error sums of the form \[\sum_{m=0}^{\infty} \varepsilon_m\Big( \,b_m\alpha - \frac{a_m}{c_m}\,\Big) \,,\] where $\alpha$ is a real number, $a_m$, $b_m$, $c_m$ are integers, and $\varepsilon_m=1$ or $\varepsilon_m…

For a sequence $S$ of terms from an abelian group $G$ of length $|S|$, let $\Sigma_n(S)$ denote the set of all elements that can be represented as the sum of terms in some $n$-term subsequence of $S$. When the subsum set is very small,…

We find the closest approximation to 1 from below using a sum of $n$ Egyptian fractions.

For given positive integers $n$ and $a$, let $R(n;\,a)$ denote the number of positive integer solutions $(x,\,y)$ of the Diophantine equation $$ {a\over n}={1\over x}+{1\over y}. $$ Write $$ S(N;\,a)=\sum_{\substack{n\leq N…

The infinitude is established of the set ${\bf U_1}$ of positive integers $N>5$ such that $G(N)\le \min(G(N/q), G(Np))$ where $q, p$ are primes, $q\ | N$ and $G(N):=\frac{\sigma(N)}{N\log \log N}$ stands for Gronwall number, $\sigma(N)$…

Let $p/q$ ($p, q \in \mathbb{N}^*$) be a positive rational number such that $p > q^2$. We show that for any $\epsilon > 0$, there exists a set $A(\epsilon) \subset [0, 1[$, with finite border and with Lebesgue measure $< \epsilon$, for…

In 1974, M. B. Nathanson proved that every irrational number $\alpha$ represented by a simple continued fraction with infinitely many elements greater than or equal to $k$ is approximable by an infinite number of rational numbers $p/q$…