Related papers: Mills' constant is irrational
The world of primes has many gaps between evidence and theorems. Here, we review Legendre's conjecture on primes between consecutive squares and recent progress on the weaker question of primes between consecutive larger powers. Assuming…
By some extremely simple arguments, we point out the following: (i) If n is the least positive k-th power non-residue modulo a positive integer m, then the greatest number of consecutive k-th power residues mod m is smaller than m/n. (ii)…
Let $Q$ be a set of primes with relative density $\delta$. We count integers in $[1,x]$ with prime factors all in $Q$ that also have a divisor in $(y,2y]$. We establish the order of magnitude for all $\delta \in (0,1]$. This generalizes the…
Let $s\ge 2$ be an integer. Denote by $\mu_s$ the least integer so that every integer $\ell >\mu_s$ is the sum of exactly $s$ integers $>1 $ which are pairwise relatively prime. In 1964, Sierpi\'nski asked a determination of $\mu_s$. Let…
For each nonprincipal Dirichlet character $\chi$, let $n_\chi$ be the least $n$ with $\chi(n) \notin \{0,1\}$. We show that as the average of $n_\chi$ over all nonprincipal characters $\chi$ modulo $q$ is $\ell(q) + o(1)$, where $\ell(q)$…
Mohammed Ben Alhocain, in an Arab manuscript of the tenth century, stated that the principal object of the theory of rational right triangles is to find a square which when increased or diminished by a certain number $m$ becomes a square…
Let $D<0$ be a fundamental discriminant and $h(D)$ be the class number of $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt{D})$. Let $R(X,D)$ be the number of classes of the binary quadratic forms of discriminant $D$ which represent a prime number in the interval…
Continued fractions are used to give an alternate proof of $e^{x/y}$ is irrational.
A semiprime is a natural number which can be written as the product of two primes. The asymptotic behaviour of the function $\pi_2(x)$, the number of semiprimes less than or equal to $x$, is studied. Using a combinatorial argument,…
In \cite{d4}, we gave a method to construct a continued fraction of the function $F(x):=e^{x}E_{1}(x)$. More precisely we define $F_{1}(x)$ as the reciprocal of $F(x)$ and we inductively define $F_{m}(x)$ as the reciprocal of ``$F_{m-1}(x)$…
Given $k \geq 2$, we show that there are at most finitely many rational numbers $x$ and $y \neq 0$ and integers $\ell \geq 2$ (with $(k,\ell) \neq (2,2)$) for which $$ x (x+1) \cdots (x+k-1) = y^\ell. $$ In particular, if we assume that…
Let $[\, \cdot\,]$ be the floor function and $\|x\|$ denotes the distance from $x$ to the nearest integer. In this paper we show that whenever $\alpha$ is irrational and $\beta$ is real then for any fixed $1<c<12/11$ there exist infinitely…
Let $\mathcal{P}$ denote the set of all primes. In 1950, P. Erd\H{o}s conjectured that if $c$ is an arbitrarily given constant, $x$ is sufficiently large and $a_1,\dots , a_t$ are positive integers with $a_1<a_2<\cdot\cdot\cdot<a_t\leqslant…
In math.NT/0307308 we defined the irrationality base of an irrational number and, assuming a stronger hypothesis than the irrationality of Euler's constant, gave a conditional upper bound on its irrationality base. Here we develop the…
In this note we show how the irrationality measure of $\zeta(s) = \pi^2/6$ can be used to obtain explicit lower bounds for $\pi(x)$. We analyze the key ingredients of the proof of the finiteness of the irrationality measure, and show how to…
Suppose that $\al>1$ is an algebraic number and $\xi>0$ is a real number. We prove that the sequence of fractional parts $\{\xi \al^n\},$ $n =1,2,3,...,$ has infinitely many limit points except when $\al$ is a PV-number and $\xi \in…
Let \(u\neq \pm 1,v^2\) be a fixed integer, let \(p\geq 2\) be a prime, and let $\text{ord}_p(u) \mid p-1$ be the multiplicative order of $u \text{ mod } p$. Define a prime counting function by $\pi(u,x)=\# \{ p\leq x:\text{ord}_p(u)=p-1…
Let $d$ be a positive integer. Let $p$ be a prime number. Let $\alpha$ be a real algebraic number of degree $d+1$. We establish that there exist a positive constant $c$ and infinitely many algebraic numbers $\xi$ of degree $d$ such that…
When studying the least common multiple of some finite sequences of integers, the first author introduced the interesting arithmetic functions $g_k$ $(k \in \mathbb{N})$, defined by $g_k(n) := \frac{n (n + 1) ... (n + k)}{\lcm(n, n + 1,…
Let $p$ be a prime number and $\xi$ an irrational $p$-adic number. Its irrationality exponent $\mu (\xi)$ is the supremum of the real numbers $\mu$ for which the system of inequalities $$ 0 < \max\{|x|, |y|\} \le X, \quad |y \xi - x|_{p}…