The quotient set of $A\subseteq \mathbb{N}$ is defined as $R(A):=\{a/b:a,b\in A,b\neq 0\}$ . Using algebraic number theory in $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt{5})$ , Garcia and Luca [‘Quotients of Fibonacci numbers’, Amer. Math. Monthly, to appear] proved that the quotient set of Fibonacci numbers is dense in the $p$ -adic numbers $\mathbb{Q}_{p}$ for all prime numbers $p$ . For any integer $k\geq 2$ , let $(F_{n}^{(k)})_{n\geq -(k-2)}$ be the sequence of $k$ -generalised Fibonacci numbers, defined by the initial values $0,0,\ldots ,0,1$ ( $k$  terms) and such that each successive term is the sum of the $k$ preceding terms. We use $p$ -adic analysis to generalise the result of Garcia and Luca, by proving that the quotient set of $k$ -generalised Fibonacci numbers is dense in $\mathbb{Q}_{p}$ for any integer $k\geq 2$ and any prime number  $p$ .

Let $S=\{q_{1},\ldots ,q_{s}\}$ be a finite, non-empty set of distinct prime numbers. For a non-zero integer $m$ , write $m=q_{1}^{r_{1}}\cdots q_{s}^{r_{s}}M$ , where $r_{1},\ldots ,r_{s}$ are non-negative integers and $M$ is an integer relatively prime to $q_{1}\cdots q_{s}$ . We define the $S$ -part $[m]_{S}$ of $m$ by $[m]_{S}:=q_{1}^{r_{1}}\cdots q_{s}^{r_{s}}$ . Let $(u_{n})_{n\geqslant 0}$ be a linear recurrence sequence of integers. Under certain necessary conditions, we establish that for every $\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}>0$ , there exists an integer $n_{0}$ such that $[u_{n}]_{S}\leqslant |u_{n}|^{\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}}$ holds for $n>n_{0}$ . Our proof is ineffective in the sense that it does not give an explicit value for $n_{0}$ . Under various assumptions on $(u_{n})_{n\geqslant 0}$ , we also give effective, but weaker, upper bounds for $[u_{n}]_{S}$ of the form $|u_{n}|^{1-c}$ , where $c$ is positive and depends only on $(u_{n})_{n\geqslant 0}$ and $S$ .

Define $r_{4}(N)$ to be the largest cardinality of a set $A\subset \{1,\ldots ,N\}$ that does not contain four elements in arithmetic progression. In 1998, Gowers proved that

$$\begin{eqnarray}r_{4}(N)\ll N(\log \log N)^{-c}\end{eqnarray}$$

$c>0$

$$\begin{eqnarray}r_{4}(N)\ll N\text{e}^{-c\sqrt{\log \log N}}.\end{eqnarray}$$

$$\begin{eqnarray}r_{4}(N)\ll N(\log N)^{-c},\end{eqnarray}$$

We improve a recent result of B. Hanson [Estimates for character sums with various convolutions. Preprint, 2015, arXiv:1509.04354] on multiplicative character sums with expressions of the type $a+b+cd$ and variables $a,b,c,d$ from four distinct sets of a finite field. We also consider similar sums with $a+b(c+d)$ . Our new bounds rely on some recent advances in additive combinatorics.

The aim of this paper is to develop analytic techniques to deal with the monotonicity of certain combinatorial sequences. On the one hand, a criterion for the monotonicity of the function is given, which is a continuous analogue of a result of Wang and Zhu. On the other hand, the log-behaviour of the functions

is considered, where ζ(x) and Γ(x) are the Riemann zeta function and the Euler Gamma function, respectively. Consequently, the strict log-concavities of the function θ(x) (a conjecture of Chen et al.) and for some combinatorial sequences (including the Bernoulli numbers, the tangent numbers, the Catalan numbers, the Fuss–Catalan numbers, and the binomial coefficients are demonstrated. In particular, this contains some results of Chen et al., and Luca and Stănică. Finally, by researching the logarithmically complete monotonicity of some functions, the infinite log-monotonicity of the sequence

is proved. This generalizes two results of Chen et al. that both the Catalan numbers and the central binomial coefficients are infinitely log-monotonic, and strengthens one result of Su and Wang that is log-convex in n for positive integers d > δ. In addition, the asymptotically infinite log-monotonicity of derangement numbers is showed. In order to research the stronger properties of the above functions θ(x) and F(x), the logarithmically complete monotonicity of functions

is also obtained, which generalizes the results of Lee and Tepedelenlioǧlu, and Qi and Li.

Poly-Euler numbers are introduced as a generalization of the Euler numbers in a manner similar to the introduction of the poly-Bernoulli numbers. In this paper, some number-theoretic properties of poly-Euler numbers, for example, explicit formulas, a Clausen–von Staudt type formula, congruence relations and duality formulas, are given together with their combinatorial properties.

Let $A$ be a subset of $\mathbb{N}$ , the set of all nonnegative integers. For an integer $h\geq 2$ , let $hA$ be the set of all sums of $h$ elements of $A$ . The set $A$ is called an asymptotic basis of order $h$ if $hA$ contains all sufficiently large integers. Otherwise, $A$ is called an asymptotic nonbasis of order $h$ . An asymptotic nonbasis $A$ of order $h$ is called a maximal asymptotic nonbasis of order $h$ if $A\cup \{a\}$ is an asymptotic basis of order $h$ for every $a\notin A$ . In this paper, we construct a sequence of asymptotic nonbases of order $h$ for each $h\geq 2$ , each of which is not a subset of a maximal asymptotic nonbasis of order $h$ .

Diophantine problems involving recurrence sequences have a long history. We consider the equation $B_{m}B_{m+d}\cdots B_{m+(k-1)d}=y^{\ell }$ in positive integers $m,d,k,y$ with $\gcd (m,d)=1$ and $k\geq 2$ , where $\ell \geq 2$ is a fixed integer and $B=(B_{n})_{n=1}^{\infty }$ is an elliptic divisibility sequence, an important class of nonlinear recurrences. We prove that the equation admits only finitely many solutions. In fact, we present an algorithm to find all possible solutions, provided that the set of $\ell$ th powers in $B$ is given. We illustrate our method by an example.

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

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

$k=6$

$p$

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

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

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

$A\cdot A+A\cdot A$

$\mathbb{F}_{p}$

Consider a translation-invariant system of linear equations Vx = 0 of complexity one, where V is an integer r × t matrix. We show that if A is a subset of the primes up to N of density at least C(log logN)–1/25t , there exists a solution x ∈ At to Vx = 0 with distinct coordinates. This extends a quantitative result of Helfgott and de Roton for three-term arithmetic progressions, while the qualitative result is known to hold for all translation-invariant systems of finite complexity by the work of Green and Tao.

By giving some new treatments we can improve a classical result of Walfisz (1963) on the asymptotic formula of Euler's function.

Let $P\in \mathbb{F}_{2}[z]$ be such that $P(0)=1$ and degree $(P)\geq 1$. Nicolas et al. [‘On the parity of additive representation functions’, J. Number Theory73 (1998), 292–317] proved that there exists a unique subset ${\mathcal{A}}={\mathcal{A}}(P)$ of $\mathbb{N}$ such that $\sum _{n\geq 0}p({\mathcal{A}},n)z^{n}\equiv P(z)~\text{mod}\,2$, where $p({\mathcal{A}},n)$ is the number of partitions of $n$ with parts in ${\mathcal{A}}$. Let $m$ be an odd positive integer and let ${\it\chi}({\mathcal{A}},.)$ be the characteristic function of the set ${\mathcal{A}}$. Finding the elements of the set ${\mathcal{A}}$ of the form $2^{k}m$, $k\geq 0$, is closely related to the $2$-adic integer $S({\mathcal{A}},m)={\it\chi}({\mathcal{A}},m)+2{\it\chi}({\mathcal{A}},2m)+4{\it\chi}({\mathcal{A}},4m)+\cdots =\sum _{k=0}^{\infty }2^{k}{\it\chi}({\mathcal{A}},2^{k}m)$, which has been shown to be an algebraic number. Let $G_{m}$ be the minimal polynomial of $S({\mathcal{A}},m)$. In precedent works there were treated the case $P$ irreducible of odd prime order $p$. In this setting, taking $p=1+ef$, where $f$ is the order of $2$ modulo $p$, explicit determinations of the coefficients of $G_{m}$ have been made for $e=2$ and 3. In this paper, we treat the case $e=4$ and use the cyclotomic numbers to make explicit $G_{m}$.

We show that if $A\subset \{1,\ldots ,N\}$ does not contain any nontrivial solutions to the equation $x+y+z=3w$ , then

$$\begin{eqnarray}|A|\leqslant \frac{N}{\exp (c(\log N)^{1/7})},\end{eqnarray}$$

$c>0$

$1/7$

$1/2$

$A+A+A$

$A\subset \{1,\ldots ,N\}$

$A\subset \mathbb{F}_{q}^{n}$

$A$

For $n\in \mathbb{Z}$ and $A\subseteq \mathbb{Z}$ , define $r_{A}(n)$ and ${\it\delta}_{A}(n)$ by $r_{A}(n)=\#\{(a_{1},a_{2})\in A^{2}:n=a_{1}+a_{2},a_{1}\leq a_{2}\}$ and ${\it\delta}_{A}(n)=\#\{(a_{1},a_{2})\in A^{2}:n=a_{1}-a_{2}\}$ . We call $A$ a unique representation bi-basis if $r_{A}(n)=1$ for all $n\in \mathbb{Z}$ and ${\it\delta}_{A}(n)=1$ for all $n\in \mathbb{Z}\setminus \{0\}$ . In this paper, we prove that there exists a unique representation bi-basis $A$ such that $\limsup _{x\rightarrow \infty }A(-x,x)/\sqrt{x}\geq 1/\sqrt{2}$ .

We show that if a finite, large enough subset $A$ of an arbitrary abelian group $G$ satisfies the small doubling condition $|A+A|\leqslant (\log |A|)^{1-{\it\varepsilon}}|A|$ , then $A$ must contain a three-term arithmetic progression whose terms are not all equal, and $A+A$ must contain an arithmetic progression or a coset of a subgroup, either of which is of size at least $\exp [c(\log |A|)^{{\it\delta}}]$ . This extends analogous results obtained by Sanders, and by Croot, Łaba and Sisask in the case where $G=\mathbb{Z}$ .

In this paper, we investigate in various ways the representation of a large natural number as a sum of a fixed power of Piatetski-Shapiro numbers, thereby establishing a variant of the Hilbert–Waring problem with numbers from a sparse sequence.

In this paper we give an extension of the results of the generalized waiting time problem given by El-Desouky and Hussen (1990). An urn contains m types of balls of unequal numbers, and balls are drawn with replacement until first duplication. In the case of finite memory of order k, let ni be the number of type i, i = 1, 2, …, m. The probability of success pi = ni/N, i = 1, 2, …, m, where ni is a positive integer and Let Ym,k be the number of drawings required until first duplication. We obtain some new expressions of the probability function, in terms of Stirling numbers, symmetric polynomials, and generalized harmonic numbers. Moreover, some special cases are investigated. Finally, some important new combinatorial identities are obtained.

We show that the restriction to square-free numbers of the representation function attached to a norm form does not correlate with nilsequences. By combining this result with previous work of Browning and the author, we obtain an application that is used in recent work of Harpaz and Wittenberg on the fibration method for rational points.

Let G be an additive abelian group, let n ⩾ 1 be an integer, let S be a sequence over G of length |S| ⩾ n + 1, and let ${\mathsf h}$ (S) denote the maximum multiplicity of a term in S. Let Σn (S) denote the set consisting of all elements in G which can be expressed as the sum of terms from a subsequence of S having length n. In this paper, we prove that either ng ∈ Σn (S) for every term g in S whose multiplicity is at least ${\mathsf h}$ (S) − 1 or |Σn (S)| ⩾ min{n + 1, |S| − n + | supp (S)| − 1}, where |supp(S)| denotes the number of distinct terms that occur in S. When G is finite cyclic and n = |G|, this confirms a conjecture of Y. O. Hamidoune from 2003.

Using results from Ramanujan's lost notebook, Zudilin recently gave an insightful proof of a radial limit result of Folsom et al. for mock theta functions. Here we see that Mortenson's previous work on the dual nature of Appell–Lerch sums and partial theta functions and on constructing bilateral q-series with mixed mock modular behaviour is well suited for such radial limits. We present five more radial limit results, which follow from mixed mock modular bilateral q-hypergeometric series. We also obtain the mixed mock modular bilateral series for a universal mock theta function of Gordon and McIntosh. The later bilateral series can be used to compute radial limits for many classical second-, sixth-, eighth- and tenth-order mock theta functions.