English

On Newman's phenomenon in higher bases

Number Theory 2015-11-11 v1

Abstract

A well known result of Newman says that upto a limit, multiples of 33 with even number of 1's in binary representation always exceed multiples of 33 with odd number of 1's. The phenomenon of preponderance of even number of 1's is now known as Newman's phenomenon. We show that this phenomenon exists for higher bases. Let bb be a positive integer(2\geq 2). Let AbA_{b} be the set of all natural numbers which contain only 0's and 1's in b-ary expansion and Sq,i(b)(n)S^{(b)}_{q,i}(n) be the difference between the corresponding number of ke<nk_e<n, keimodqk_e\equiv i \mod q, keAbk_e\in A_{b} and kek_e has even number of 1's in b-ary expansion and the number of kok_o ko<nk_o<n, koimodqk_o\equiv i \mod q, koAbk_o\in A_{b} and kok_o has odd number of 1's in b-ary expansion. Let qq be a multiple or divisor of b+1b+1 which is relatively prime to bb then we show that Sq,0(b)(n)>0S^{(b)}_{q,0}(n)>0 for sufficiently large nn. We show that there is a stronger Newman's phenomenon in AbA_b in the following sense. If b>2b>2 and n=i=0k1bi2in=\sum_{i=0}^{k-1}b_i2^i with bi{0,1}b_i\in \{0,1\}, let b(n)=i=0k1bibib(n)=\sum_{i=0}^{k-1}b_ib^i then limnS3,0(2)(n)Sb+1,0(b)(b(n))=0\lim_{n\rightarrow \infty} \frac{S^{(2)}_{3,0}(n)}{S^{(b)}_{b+1,0}(b(n))}=0. That is, for the same number of terms there is stronger preponderance in AbA_b than in A2=NA_2=\mathbb{N}. In the last section we show that number of primes pxp\leq x for which Sp,0(b)(n)>0S_{p,0}^{(b)}(n)>0 for sufficiently large nn is o(xlogx)o\left(\frac{x}{\log x}\right).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1511.03236,
  title  = {On Newman's phenomenon in higher bases},
  author = {Sai Teja Somu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.03236},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

14 pages, submitted to INTEGERS: Electronic Journal of Combinatorial Number Theory

R2 v1 2026-06-22T11:41:49.063Z