Forster [‘Finite-to-one maps’, J. Symbolic Logic68 (2003), 1251–1253] showed, in Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, that if there is a finite-to-one map from ${\mathcal{P}}(A)$ , the set of all subsets of a set $A$ , onto $A$ , then $A$ must be finite. If we assume the axiom of choice (AC), the cardinalities of ${\mathcal{P}}(A)$ and the set $S(A)$ of permutations on $A$ are equal for any infinite set $A$ . In the absence of AC, we cannot make any conclusion about the relationship between the two cardinalities for an arbitrary infinite set. In this paper, we give a condition that makes Forster’s theorem, with ${\mathcal{P}}(A)$ replaced by $S(A)$ , provable without AC.

In 1939, Erdös and Mahler [‘Some arithmetical properties of the convergents of a continued fraction’, J. Lond. Math. Soc. (2)14 (1939), 12–18] studied some arithmetical properties of the convergents of a continued fraction. In particular, they raised a conjecture related to continued fractions and Liouville numbers. In this paper, we shall apply the theory of linear forms in logarithms to obtain a result in the direction of this problem.

Two results related to the mixed joint universality for a polynomial Euler product $\unicode[STIX]{x1D711}(s)$ and a periodic Hurwitz zeta function $\unicode[STIX]{x1D701}(s,\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC};\mathfrak{B})$ , when $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ is a transcendental parameter, are given. One is the mixed joint functional independence and the other is a generalised universality, which includes several periodic Hurwitz zeta functions.

In this paper, we show that every pair of large positive even integers can be represented in the form of a pair of Goldbach–Linnik equations, that is, linear equations in two primes and $k$ powers of two. In particular, $k=34$ powers of two suffice, in general, and $k=18$ under the generalised Riemann hypothesis. Our result sharpens the number of powers of two in previous results, which gave $k=62$ , in general, and $k=31$ under the generalised Riemann hypothesis.

Let $A_{2}$ be a free associative algebra or polynomial algebra of rank two over a field of characteristic zero. The main results of this paper are the classification of noninjective endomorphisms of $A_{2}$ and an algorithm to determine whether a given noninjective endomorphism of $A_{2}$ has a nontrivial fixed element for a polynomial algebra. The algorithm for a free associative algebra of rank two is valid whenever an element is given and the subalgebra generated by this element contains the image of the given noninjective endomorphism.

A special atom (respectively, supernilpotent atom) is a minimal element of the lattice $\mathbb{S}$ of all special radicals (respectively, a minimal element of the lattice $\mathbb{K}$ of all supernilpotent radicals). A semiprime ring $R$ is called prime essential if every nonzero prime ideal of $R$ has a nonzero intersection with each nonzero two-sided ideal of $R$ . We construct a prime essential ring $R$ such that the smallest supernilpotent radical containing $R$ is not a supernilpotent atom but where the smallest special radical containing $R$ is a special atom. This answers a question put by Puczylowski and Roszkowska.

Some classes of finitely generated hyperabelian groups defined in terms of semipermutability and S-semipermutability are studied in the paper. The classification of finitely generated hyperabelian groups all of whose finite quotients are PST-groups recently obtained by Robinson is behind our results. An alternative proof of such a classification is also included in the paper.

The logarithmic coefficients $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}_{n}$ of an analytic and univalent function $f$ in the unit disc $\mathbb{D}=\{z\in \mathbb{C}:|z|<1\}$ with the normalisation $f(0)=0=f^{\prime }(0)-1$ are defined by $\log (f(z)/z)=2\sum _{n=1}^{\infty }\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}_{n}z^{n}$ . In the present paper, we consider close-to-convex functions (with argument 0) with respect to odd starlike functions and determine the sharp upper bound of $|\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}_{n}|$ , $n=1,2,3$ , for such functions  $f$ .

In this paper, we prove some value distribution results which lead to normality criteria for a family of meromorphic functions involving the sharing of a holomorphic function by more general differential polynomials generated by members of the family, and improve some recent results. In particular, the main result of this paper leads to a counterexample to the converse of Bloch’s principle.

We use a generalised Nevanlinna counting function to compute the Hilbert–Schmidt norm of a composition operator on the Bergman space $L_{a}^{2}(\mathbb{D})$ and weighted Bergman spaces $L_{a}^{1}(\text{d}A_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}})$ when $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ is a nonnegative integer.

We find all real-valued general solutions $f:S\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ of the d’Alembert functional equation with involution

$$\begin{eqnarray}\displaystyle f(x+y)+f(x+\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}y)=2f(x)f(y) & & \displaystyle \nonumber\end{eqnarray}$$

$x,y\in S$

$S$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}~:~S\rightarrow S$

$f:\mathbb{R}^{n}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}:\mathbb{R}^{n}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{n}$

$f:\mathbb{R}^{n}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$

$$\begin{eqnarray}\displaystyle f(x+y)+f(x-y)=2f(x)f(y) & & \displaystyle \nonumber\end{eqnarray}$$

$x,y\in \mathbb{R}^{n}$

$f:\mathbb{R}^{n}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$

Let $X$ be a nonempty subset of a normed space such that $0\notin X$ and $X$ is symmetric with respect to $0$ and let $Y$ be a Banach space. We study the generalised hyperstability of the Drygas functional equation

$$\begin{eqnarray}f(x+y)+f(x-y)=2f(x)+f(y)+f(-y),\end{eqnarray}$$

$f$

$X$

$Y$

$x,y\in X$

$x+y,x-y\in X$

Collections of functions forming a partition of unity play an important role in analysis. In this paper we characterise for any $N\in \mathbb{N}$ the entire functions $P$ for which the partition of unity condition $\sum _{\mathbf{n}\in \mathbb{Z}^{d}}P(\mathbf{x}+\mathbf{n})\unicode[STIX]{x1D712}_{[0,N]^{d}}(\mathbf{x}+\mathbf{n})=1$ holds for all $\mathbf{x}\in \mathbb{R}^{d}.$ The general characterisation leads to various easy ways of constructing such entire functions as well. We demonstrate the flexibility of the approach by showing that additional properties like continuity or differentiability of the functions $(P\unicode[STIX]{x1D712}_{[0,N]^{d}})(\cdot +\mathbf{n})$ can be controlled. In particular, this leads to easy ways of constructing entire functions $P$ such that the functions in the partition of unity belong to the Feichtinger algebra.

We show that any mapping between two real $p$ -normed spaces, which preserves the unit distance and the midpoint of segments with distance $2^{p}$ , is an isometry. Making use of it, we provide an alternative proof of some known results on the Aleksandrov question in normed spaces and also generalise these known results to $p$ -normed spaces.

Motivated by the local theory of Banach spaces, we introduce a notion of finite representability for metric spaces. This allows us to develop a new technique for comparing the generalised roundness of metric spaces. We illustrate this technique by applying it to Banach spaces and metric trees. In the realm of Banach spaces we obtain results such as the following: (1) if ${\mathcal{U}}$ is any ultrafilter and $X$ is any Banach space, then the second dual $X^{\ast \ast }$ and the ultrapower $(X)_{{\mathcal{U}}}$ have the same generalised roundness as $X$ , and (2) no Banach space of positive generalised roundness is uniformly homeomorphic to $c_{0}$ or $\ell _{p}$ , $2<p<\infty$ . For metric trees, we give the first examples of metric trees of generalised roundness one that have finite diameter. In addition, we show that metric trees of generalised roundness one possess special Euclidean embedding properties that distinguish them from all other metric trees.

We say that a Banach space $X$ is ‘nice’ if every extreme operator from any Banach space into $X$ is a nice operator (that is, its adjoint preserves extreme points). We prove that if $X$ is a nice almost $CL$ -space, then $X$ is isometrically isomorphic to $c_{0}(I)$ for some set $I$ . We also show that if $X$ is a nice Banach space whose closed unit ball has the Krein–Milman property, then $X$ is $l_{\infty }^{n}$ for some $n\in \mathbb{N}$ . The proof of our results relies on the structure topology.

In this paper we establish operator quasilinearity properties of some functionals associated with Davis–Choi–Jensen’s inequality for positive maps and operator convex or concave functions. Applications for the power function and the logarithm are provided.

In this paper we prove Caristi’s fixed point theorem using only purely metric techniques.

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.