English

Powers in prime bases and a problem on central binomial coefficients

Number Theory 2026-01-15 v1

Abstract

It is an open problem whether (2nn) \binom{2n}{n} is divisible by 4 or 9 for all n>256n>256. In connection with this, we prove that for a fixed uneven mm the asymptotic density of kk's such that m(2k+12k) m \nmid \binom{2^{k+1}}{2^{k}} is 0. To do so we examine numbers of the form αk\alpha^{k} in base pp, where pp is a prime and (α,p)=1(\alpha, p)=1. For every nn and aa we find an upper bound on the number of kk's less than aa such that (αk)p(\alpha^{k})_p contains less than nn digits greater than p2\frac{p}{2}. This is done by showing that every sequence of the form σt,,σ1,σ0\langle \sigma_t, \dots, \sigma_1,\sigma_0 \rangle, where 0σi<p0\leq \sigma_i<p for i1i\geq 1 and σ0\sigma_0 is in the residue class generated by α\alpha modulo pp, occurs at specific places in the representation (αk)p(\alpha^k)_p as kk varies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.09510,
  title  = {Powers in prime bases and a problem on central binomial coefficients},
  author = {Sebastian Tim Holdum and Frederik Ravn Klausen and Peter Michael Reichstein Rasmussen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.09510},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

12 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:04:23.227Z