The structure and number of Erdős covering systems (Q6151862)

Summary: Introduced by Erdős in 1950, a \textit{covering system} of the integers is a finite collection of arithmetic progressions whose union is the set \(\mathbb{Z}\). Many beautiful questions and conjectures about covering systems have been posed over the past several decades, but until recently little was known about their properties. Most famously, the so-called minimum modulus problem of Erdős was resolved in 2015 by Hough, who proved that in every covering system with distinct moduli, the minimum modulus is at most \(10^{16}\). In this paper we answer another question of Erdős, asked in 1952, on the \textit{number} of minimal covering systems. More precisely, we show that the number of minimal covering systems with exactly elements \(n\) is \[ \exp \left( \left(\frac{4 \sqrt{\tau}}{3} + o(1) \right) \frac{n^{3/2}}{(\log n)^{1/2}} \right) \quad \text{as } n \to \infty, \text{ where} \quad \tau = \sum\limits_{t=1}^\infty \left(\log \frac{t+1}{t}\right)^2. \] En route to this counting result, we obtain a structural description of all covering systems that are close to optimal in an appropriate sense.