English

Biases in prime factorizations and Liouville functions for arithmetic progressions

Number Theory 2020-07-24 v2

Abstract

We introduce a refinement of the classical Liouville function to primes in arithmetic progressions. Using this, we discover new biases in the appearances of primes in a given arithmetic progression in the prime factorizations of integers. For example, we observe that the primes of the form 4k+14k+1 tend to appear an even number of times in the prime factorization of a given integer, more so than for primes of the form 4k+34k+3. We are led to consider variants of P\'olya's conjecture, supported by extensive numerical evidence, and its relation to other conjectures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.07979,
  title  = {Biases in prime factorizations and Liouville functions for arithmetic progressions},
  author = {Peter Humphries and Snehal M. Shekatkar and Tian An Wong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.07979},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

25 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:28:05.121Z