Greedy sums of distinct squares
Given a positive integer \(n\), write \(n=s_1^2+s_2^2+\dots+s_r^2\) in such a way that at each step the positive integer \(s_i\) is chosen so as to be maximal. It is clear that \(s_1\geq s_2\geq \dots\geq s_r\), but if the above sequence is strictly decreasing the authors refer to \(n\) as being a greedy sum of squares. In this very interesting paper, the authors investigate the asymptotic properties of the set of greedy sums of squares. More precisely, let \(a\) be the characteristic function of the set of greedy sums of squares, and for a positive real number \(x\) put \(A(x)=\sum_{n\leq x} a(n)\). Theorem 1 of the paper asserts that there exists a continuous nonconstant function \(f\) with period \(1\) such that \[ \lim_{{k\rightarrow \infty}\atop {k\in {\mathbb Z}}} {{A(4\text{ exp}(2^{k+x}))} \over {4\text{ exp}(2^{k+x})}}=f(x). \] In particular, the set of greedy sums of squares does not have a natural density. The proof of this theorem is quite technical and relies on no less than eight lemmas. The line of attack is roughly as follows. The authors first approximate \(A(x)\) by a function \(B(x)\), where \(B\) is continuous and satisfies an integral equation, and show that \(A(x)/x\) is then uniformly approximated by \(B(x)/x\). Consideration of \(B\) then leads to a differential-difference equation whose limiting distribution is shown to exist and leads to the conclusion of Theorem 1 modulo showing that \(f\) is nonconstant. This last task is achieved by computing several values of \(f\) within an accuracy of \(5\cdot 10^{-5}\) and finding a difference of more than \(0.003\) (but less than \(0.007\)) between its minimum and maximum values. The authors' Theorem 2 says that if \(h\) is a positive integer and if one denotes by \(S(h)\) the number of all possible \(\{0,1\}\) patterns that arise as \(a(n+1),\dots,a(n+h)\) for some positive integer \(n\), then the sequence \(\{S(h)\}_{h\geq 1}\) satisfies a linear recurrence of order \(9\). For some of their results, the authors used some computer programs written in Maple and TurboPascal.
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- scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1231230 (Why is no real title available?)
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