Related papers: Asymmetries in the Shanks-Renyi Prime Number Race

Rubinstein and Sarnak investigated systems of inequalities of the form pi(x;q,a_1) > ... > pi(x;q,a_r), where pi(x;q,a) denotes the number of primes up to x that are congruent to a mod q. They showed, under standard hypotheses on the zeros…

Chebyshev was the first to observe a bias in the distribution of primes in residue classes. The general phenomenon is that if $a$ is a nonsquare\mod q and $b$ is a square\mod q, then there tend to be more primes congruent to $a\mod q$ than…

We generalize current known distribution results on Shanks--R\'enyi prime number races to the case where arbitrarily many residue classes are involved. Our method handles both the classical case that goes back to Chebyshev and function…

It is well known that $li(x)>\pi(x)$ (i) up to the (very large) Skewes' number $x_1 \sim 1.40 \times 10^{316}$ \cite{Bays00}. But, according to a Littlewood's theorem, there exist infinitely many $x$ that violate the inequality, due to the…

Let $\pi_{q,a}(x)$ denote the number of primes $\le x$ in the progression $a$ modulo $q$. We study subtle inequities in these functions, with $q$ fixed and variable $a$ (sometimes called 'prime race problems'). It is known unconditionally…

Let P(x,d,a) denote the number of primes p<=x with p=a(mod d). Chebyshev's bias is the phenomenon that `more often' P(x;d,n)>P(x;d,r) than the other way around, where n is a quadratic non-residue mod d and r is a quadratic residue mod d. If…

Chebyshev observed in a letter to Fuss that there tends to be more primes of the form $4n+3$ than of the form $4n+1$. The general phenomenon, which is referred to as Chebyshev's bias, is that primes tend to be biased in their distribution…

Let $\pi(x;q,a)$ denote the number of primes up to $x$ that are congruent to $a$ modulo $q$. A prime number race, for fixed modulus $q$ and residue classes $a_1, \ldots, a_r$, investigates the system of inequalities $\pi(x;q,a_1) >…

This is a survey article on prime number races. Chebyshev noticed in the first half of the nineteenth century that for any given value of x, there always seem to be more primes of the form 4n+3 less than x then there are of the form 4n+1.…

Fix a prime $p >2$ and a finite field $\mathbb{F}_{q}$ with $q$ elements, where $q$ is a power of $p$. Let $m$ be a monic polynomial in the polynomial ring $\mathbb{F}_{q}[T]$ such that $deg(m)$ is large. Fix an integer $r\geq 2$, and let…

We survey results about prime number races, that is, results about the relative sizes of prime counting functions $\pi_{q,a}(x)$, with $q$ fixed and $a$ varying. In particular, we describe recent work by the authors on these problems.

Let $a_1$, $a_2$, and $a_3$ be distinct reduced residues modulo $q$ satisfying the congruences $a_1^2 \equiv a_2^2 \equiv a_3^2 \pmod q$. We conditionally derive an asymptotic formula, with an error term that has a power savings in $q$, for…

In the article we establish the Hardy-Littlewood inequality $ \pi (x + y) \leq \pi (x) + \pi (y) $. We also prove that the naturally ordered primes $p_1=2,p_2=3,p_3=5,p_4=7,\dots$ satisfy the inequality $ p_ {a + b}> p_a + p_b $ for all $a,…

Let $\chi$ be a Dirichlet character mod $D$ with $L(s,\chi)$ its associated $L$-function, and let $\psi(x,q,a)$ be Chebyshev's prime-counting function for primes congruent to $a$ modulo $q$. We show that under the assumption of an…

For any $k\geq 1$, this paper studies the number of polynomials having $k$ irreducible factors (counted with or without multiplicities) in $\mathbf{F}_q[t]$ among different arithmetic progressions. We obtain asymptotic formulas for the…

We investigate the race between prime numbers in many residue classes modulo $q$, assuming the standard conjectures GRH and LI. Among our results we exhibit, for the first time, prime races modulo $q$ with $n$ competitor classes where the…

For any $\epsilon>0$, there exists $q_0(\epsilon)$ such for any $q\ge q_0(\epsilon)$ and any invertible residue class $a$ modulo $q$, there exists a natural number that is congruent to $a$ modulo $q$ and that is the product of exactly three…

For any $k\geq 1$, we study the distribution of the difference between the number of integers $n\leq x$ with $\omega(n)=k$ or $\Omega(n)=k$ in two different arithmetic progressions, where $\omega(n)$ is the number of distinct prime factors…

Under two assumptions, we determine the distribution of the difference between two functions each counting the numbers < x that are in a given arithmetic progression modulo q and the product of two primes. The two assumptions are (i) the…

We study how often exceptional configurations of irreducible polynomials over finite fields occur in the context of prime number races and Chebyshev's bias. In particular, we show that three types of biases, which we call "complete bias",…