Let $a_{1},a_{2},\ldots ,a_{m}$ and $b_{1},b_{2},\ldots ,b_{l}$ be two sequences of pairwise distinct positive integers greater than $1$. Assume also that none of the above numbers is a perfect power. If for each positive integer $n$ and prime number $p$ the number $\prod _{i=1}^{m}(1-a_{i}^{n})$ is divisible by $p$ if and only if the number $\prod _{j=1}^{l}(1-b_{j}^{n})$ is divisible by $p$, then $m=l$ and $\{a_{1},a_{2},\ldots ,a_{m}\}=\{b_{1},b_{2},\ldots ,b_{l}\}$.

In this note, we give an upper bound for the number of elements from the interval $[1,p^{1/4\sqrt{e}+\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}}]$ necessary to generate the finite field $\mathbb{F}_{p}^{\ast }$ with $p$ an odd prime. The general result depends on the distribution of the divisors of $p-1$ and can be used to deduce results which hold for almost all primes.

Robin’s criterion states that the Riemann hypothesis is true if and only if $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}(n)<e^{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}}n\log \log n$ for every positive integer $n\geq 5041$. In this paper we establish a new unconditional upper bound for the sum of divisors function, which improves the current best unconditional estimate given by Robin. For this purpose, we use a precise approximation for Chebyshev’s $\unicode[STIX]{x1D717}$-function.

Let $b$ be an integer larger than 1. We give an asymptotic formula for the exponential sum

$$\begin{eqnarray}\mathop{\sum }_{\substack{ p\leqslant x \\ g(p)=k}}\exp \big(2\text{i}\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}p\big),\end{eqnarray}$$

$p$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}\in \mathbb{R}$

$k\in \mathbb{Z}$

$g:\mathbb{N}\rightarrow \mathbb{Z}$

$b$

$\operatorname{pgcd}(g(1),\ldots ,g(b-1))=1$

We employ some formulae on hypergeometric series and p-adic Gamma function to establish several congruences.

Rodriguez-Villegas conjectured four supercongruences associated to certain elliptic curves, which were first confirmed by Mortenson by using the Gross–Koblitz formula. In this paper we prove four supercongruences between two truncated hypergeometric series $_{2}F_{1}$. The results generalise the four Rodriguez-Villegas supercongruences.

A seminal result due to Wall states that if $x$ is normal to a given base $b$, then so is $rx+s$ for any rational numbers $r,s$ with $r\neq 0$. We show that a stronger result is true for normality with respect to the continued fraction expansion. In particular, suppose $a,b,c,d\in \mathbb{Z}$ with $ad-bc\neq 0$. Then if $x$ is continued fraction normal, so is $(ax+b)/(cx+d)$.

We investigate the monotonic characteristics of the generalised binomial coefficients (phinomials) based upon Euler’s totient function. We show, unconditionally, that the set of integers for which this sequence is unimodal is finite and, assuming the generalised Riemann hypothesis, we find all the exceptions.

We prove an asymptotic formula for squarefree numbers in arithmetic progressions, improving previous results by Prachar and Hooley. As a consequence we improve a lower bound of Heath-Brown for the least squarefree number in an arithmetic progression.

Let $r\geq 2$ and $s\geq 2$ be multiplicatively dependent integers. We establish a lower bound for the sum of the block complexities of the $r$-ary expansion and the $s$-ary expansion of an irrational real number, viewed as infinite words on $\{0,1,\ldots ,r-1\}$ and $\{0,1,\ldots ,s-1\}$, and we show that this bound is best possible.

A lattice walk with all steps having the same length $d$ is called a $d$-walk. Denote by ${\mathcal{T}}_{d}$ the terminal set, that is, the set of all lattice points that can be reached from the origin by means of a $d$-walk. We examine some geometric and algebraic properties of the terminal set. After observing that $({\mathcal{T}}_{d},+)$ is a normal subgroup of the group $(\mathbb{Z}^{N},+)$, we ask questions about the quotient group $\mathbb{Z}^{N}/{\mathcal{T}}_{d}$ and give the number of elements of $\mathbb{Z}^{2}/{\mathcal{T}}_{d}$ in terms of $d$. To establish this result, we use several consequences of Fermat’s theorem about representations of prime numbers of the form $4k+1$ as the sum of two squares. One of the consequences is the fact, observed by Sierpiński, that every natural power of such a prime number has exactly one relatively prime representation. We provide explicit formulas for the relatively prime integers in this representation.

We improve recent results of Bourgain and Shparlinski to show that, for almost all primes $p$, there is a multiple $mp$ that can be written in binary as

$$\begin{eqnarray}mp=1+2^{m_{1}}+\cdots +2^{m_{k}},\quad 1\leq m_{1}<\cdots <m_{k},\end{eqnarray}$$

$k=6$

$p$

$A=\langle g\rangle \subset \mathbb{F}_{p}^{\ast }$

$g\in \{2,3,5\}$

$|A|\gg p/(\log p)^{3}$

$A\cdot A+A\cdot A$

$\mathbb{F}_{p}$

In this short note, we give a proof, conditional on the generalised Riemann hypothesis, that there exist numbers $x$ which are normal with respect to the continued fraction expansion but not to any base-$b$ expansion. This partially answers a question of Bugeaud.

In this paper, we study how small a box contains at least two points from a modular hyperbola $xy\equiv c\;(\text{mod}\;p)$ . There are two such points in a square of side length $p^{1/4+\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}}$ . Furthermore, it turns out that either there are two such points in a square of side length $p^{1/6+\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}}$ or the least quadratic non-residue is less than $p^{1/(6\sqrt{e})+\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}}$ .

Let $q\in (1,2)$. A $q$-expansion of a number $x$ in $[0,1/(q-1)]$ is a sequence $({\it\delta}_{i})_{i=1}^{\infty }\in \{0,1\}^{\mathbb{N}}$ satisfying

$$\begin{eqnarray}x=\mathop{\sum }_{i=1}^{\infty }\frac{{\it\delta}_{i}}{q^{i}}.\end{eqnarray}$$

${\mathcal{B}}_{\aleph _{0}}$

$q$

$x$

$q$

${\mathcal{B}}_{1,\aleph _{0}}$

$q$

$1$

$q$

$1=\sum _{i=1}^{\infty }q^{-n_{i}}$

$\min {\mathcal{B}}_{\aleph _{0}}=\min {\mathcal{B}}_{1,\aleph _{0}}=(1+\sqrt{5})/2$

${\mathcal{B}}_{\aleph _{0}}\cap ((1+\sqrt{5})/2,q_{1}]=\{q_{1}\}$

$q_{1}\,({\approx}1.64541)$

$x^{6}-x^{4}-x^{3}-2x^{2}-x-1=0$

${\mathcal{B}}_{1,\aleph _{0}}$

$q_{3}\,({\approx}1.68042)$

$x^{5}-x^{4}-x^{3}-x+1=0$

${\mathcal{B}}_{\aleph _{0}}\cap (q_{1},q_{3}]=\{q_{2},q_{3}\}$

$q_{2}\,({\approx}1.65462)$

$x^{6}-2x^{4}-x^{3}-1=0$

In light of the recent work by Maynard and Tao on the Dickson $k$-tuples conjecture, we show that with a small improvement in the known bounds for this conjecture, we would be able to prove that for some fixed $R$, there are infinitely many Carmichael numbers with exactly $R$ factors for some fixed $R$. In fact, we show that there are infinitely many such $R$.

Let $P(n)$ denote the largest prime factor of an integer $n\geq 2$. In this paper, we study the distribution of the sequence $\{f(P(n)):n\geq 1\}$ over the set of congruence classes modulo an integer $b\geq 2$, where $f$ is a strongly $q$-additive integer-valued function (that is, $f(aq^{j}+b)=f(a)+f(b),$ with $(a,b,j)\in \mathbb{N}^{3}$, $0\leq b<q^{j}$). We also show that the sequence $\{{\it\alpha}P(n):n\geq 1,f(P(n))\equiv a\;(\text{mod}~b)\}$ is uniformly distributed modulo 1 if and only if ${\it\alpha}\in \mathbb{R}\!\setminus \!\mathbb{Q}$.

A prime sieve is an algorithm that finds the primes up to a bound $n$. We say that a prime sieve is incremental, if it can quickly determine if $n+1$ is prime after having found all primes up to $n$. We say a sieve is compact if it uses roughly $\sqrt{n}$ space or less. In this paper, we present two new results.

–

We describe the rolling sieve, a practical, incremental prime sieve that takes $O(n\log \log n)$ time and $O(\sqrt{n}\log n)$ bits of space.

The second result solves an open problem given by Paul Pritchard in 1994.

We prove an asymptotic formula for the sum $\sum _{n\leq N}d(n^{2}-1)$, where $d(n)$ denotes the number of divisors of $n$. During the course of our proof, we also furnish an asymptotic formula for the sum $\sum _{d\leq N}g(d)$, where $g(d)$ denotes the number of solutions $x$ in $\mathbb{Z}_{d}$ to the equation $x^{2}\equiv 1~(\text{mod}~d)$.