Related papers: Short proofs in combinatorics and number theory
The goal of this paper is to describe an elementary combinatorial heuristic that predicts Hardy and Littlewood's extended Goldbach's conjecture. We examine common features of other heuristics in additive prime number theory, such as…
We adopt a physically motivated empirical approach to the characterisation of the distributions of twin and triplet primes within the set of primes, rather than in the set of all natural numbers. Remarkably, the occurrences of twins or…
We show the existence of regular combinatorial objects which previously were not known to exist. Specifically, for a wide range of the underlying parameters, we show the existence of non-trivial orthogonal arrays, t-designs, and t-wise…
In 1737 Leonard Euler gave what we often now think of as a new proof, based on infinite series, of Euclid's theorem that there are infinitely many prime numbers. Our short paper uses a simple modification of Euler's argument to obtain new…
We introduce a new approach to an enumerative problem closely linked with the geometry of branched coverings; that is, we study the number of ways a permutation can be decomposed into a product of a given number of 2-cycles, 3-cycles, etc.…
The hypergraph container lemma is a powerful tool in probabilistic combinatorics that has found many applications since it was first proved a decade ago. Roughly speaking, it asserts that the family of independent sets of every uniform…
Carlitz considered integer compositions in which adjacent parts must be unequal. Arndt recently initiated the study of restricted compositions based on conditions applied to certain pairs of parts rather than to individual parts. Here, we…
In a recent paper, Andrews and Merca investigated the number of even parts in all partitions of $n$ into distinct parts, which arise naturally from the Euler-Glaisher bijective proof. They obtained new combinatorial interpretations for this…
We announce a number of conjectures associated with and arising from a study of primes and irrationals in $\mathbb{R}$. All are supported by numerical verification to the extent possible.
In [2], while studying a relevant class of polyominoes that tile the plane by translation, i.e., double square polyominoes, the authors found that their boundary words, encoded by the Freeman chain coding on a four letters alphabet, have…
We shall give an explicit upper bound for the smallest prime factor of multiperfect numbers of the form $N=p_1^{\alpha_1}\cdots p_s^{\alpha_s} q_1^{\beta_1}\cdots q_t^{\beta_t}$ with $\beta_1, \ldots, \beta_t$ bounded by a given constant.…
A study of certain Hamiltonian systems has lead Y. Long to conjecture the existence of infinitely many primes of the form $p=2[\alpha n]+1$, where $1<\alpha<2$ is a fixed irrational number. An argument of P. Ribenboim coupled with classical…
We investigate the partitioning of partial orders into a minimal number of heapable subsets. We prove a characterization result reminiscent of the proof of Dilworth's theorem, which yields as a byproduct a flow-based algorithm for computing…
In this paper, we study a combinatorial problem originating in the following conjecture of Erdos and Lemke: given any sequence of n divisors of n, repetitions being allowed, there exists a subsequence the elements of which are summing to n.…
We provide a combinatorial characterization of all testable properties of $k$-uniform hypergraphs ($k$-graphs for short). Here, a $k$-graph property $P$ is testable if there is a randomized algorithm which makes a bounded number of edge…
Improving earlier estimates of several authors we show that the number E(X) of Goldbach exceptional even integers (that is, even integers which cannot be written as the sum of two primesw) below X satisfies tho bound E(X) < X^0.72 for…
This short note answers a question raised by Nathanson \cite{Nath25} about "races" between iterated sumsets. We prove that for any integer $n$, there are finite sets of integers $A$ and $B$ with same diameter such that the signs of the…
A classical problem in analytic number theory is to study the distribution of $\alpha p$ modulo 1, where $\alpha$ is irrational and $p$ runs over the set of primes. We consider the subsequence generated by the primes $p$ such that $p+2$ is…
Standard approaches to probabilistic reasoning require that one possesses an explicit model of the distribution in question. But, the empirical learning of models of probability distributions from partial observations is a problem for which…
New and old results on closed polynomials, i.e., such polynomials f in K[x_1,...,x_n] that the subalgebra K[f] is integrally closed in K[x_1,...,x_n], are collected. Using some properties of closed polynomials we prove the following…