(Non)Automaticity of number theoretic functions (Q628832)

The authors prove that Liouville's arithmetic function \(\lambda(n)\) is not \(k\)-automatic for any \(k>2\). This yields that \(\sum _{n=1}^{\infty }\lambda (n)X^{ n }\in \mathbb F_{ p }[[X]]\) is transcendental over \(\mathbb F_{ p }(X)\) for any prime \(p>2\). Similar results are proven (or reproven) for many common arithmetic functions, including \(\phi \) (Euler's function ), \(\mu \) (Möbius), \(\Omega \), \(\omega \), \(\rho \), and others.