Related papers: Midy's Theorem for Periodic Decimals
A set of integers greater than 1 is primitive if no member in the set divides another. Erd\H{o}s proved in 1935 that the series $f(A) = \sum_{a\in A}1/(a \log a)$ is uniformly bounded over all choices of primitive sets $A$. In 1986 he asked…
We reformulate several known results about continued fractions in combinatorial terms. Among them the theorem of Conway and Coxeter and that of Series, both relating continued fractions and triangulations. More general polygon dissections…
Is .999... equal to 1? Lightstone's decimal expansions yield an infinity of numbers in [0,1] whose expansion starts with an unbounded number of digits "9". We present some non-standard thoughts on the ambiguity of an ellipsis, modeling the…
This paper is a continuation of a previous paper. Here, as there, we examine the problem of finding the maximum number of terms in a partial sequence of distinct unit fractions larger than 1/100 that sums to 1. In the previous paper, we…
We study, from the viewpoint of metrical number theory and (infinite) ergodic theory, the probabilistic laws governing the occurrence of prime numbers as digits in continued fraction expansions of real numbers.
An elementary but useful fact is that the numerator of the difference of two consecutive Farey fractions is equal to one. For triples of consecutive fractions the numerators of the differences are well understood and have applications to…
In 1845, Bertrand conjectured that twice any prime strictly exceeds the next prime. Tchebichef proved Bertrand's postulate in 1850. In 1934, Ishikawa proved a stronger result: the sum of any two consecutive primes strictly exceeds the next…
For a linear code $C$ of length $n$ with dimension $k$ and minimum distance $d$, it is desirable that the quantity $kd/n$ is large. Given an arbitrary field $\mathbb{F}$, we introduce a novel, but elementary, construction that produces a…
Given a map f:Z-->Z and an initial argument alpha, we can iterate the map to get a finite set of iterates modulo a prime p. In particular, for a quadratic map f(z)=z^2 +c, c constant, work by Pollard suggests that this set should have…
Continued fraction expansions provide a well-established bridge between algebraic properties of numbers and combinatorics on words. In this article, we investigate the algebraicity of $p$-adic numbers whose continued fractions arise from…
We study additive properties of consecutive prime numbers and the primality of the sums they generate. For a given prime number $p_n$, we consider the sums \[ S_k(p_n) = p_n + p_{n+1} + \cdots + p_{n+k-1}, \] where $k \ge 3$ is an odd…
We give new characterizations of the Midy's property and using these results we obtain a new proof of a special case of the Dirichlet's theorem about primes in arithmetic progression.
The Index Conjecture in zero-sum theory states that when $n$ is coprime to $6$ and $k$ equals $4$, every minimal zero-sum sequence of length $k$ modulo $n$ has index $1$. While other values of $(k,n)$ have been studied thoroughly in the…
The sequence of 1/2-discrepancy sums of $\{x + i \theta \bmod 1\}$ is realized through a sequence of substitutions on an alphabet of three symbols; particular attention is paid to $x=0$. The first application is to show that any asymptotic…
In this paper, we show that the concatenation of the Fibonacci sequence is \textit{normal} in base $10$, meaning every string of a given length, $k$, occurs as frequently as every other string of length $k$ (there are as many $1$'s as $2$'s…
This note presents an especially short and direct variant of Hermite's proof of the simple continued fraction expansion e = [2,1,2,1,1,4,1,1,6,...] and explains some of the motivation behind it.
Every odd prime number p can be written in exactly (p + 1)/2 ways as a sum ab+cd of two ordered products ab and cd such that min(a, b) > max(c, d). An easy corollary is a proof of Fermat's Theorem expressing primes in 1 + 4N as sums of two…
I show that a trivial modification of a standard proof of the Roth's Theorem on triples in arithmetic progression would lead to the following Theorem: If A is a "large set" that is its elements are monotone increasing integers and the sum…
We prove that there is an absolute constant $c > 0$ such that for every $$a_0,a_1, \ldots,a_n \in [1,M]\,, \qquad 1 \leq M \leq \frac 14 \exp \left( \frac n9 \right)\,,$$ there are $$b_0,b_1,\ldots,b_n \in \{-1,0,1\}$$ such that the…
A recently posed question of Haggkvist and Scott's asked whether or not there exists a constant c such that if G is a graph of minimum degree ck then G contains cycles of k consecutive even lengths. In this paper we answer the question by…