Physical mathematics in number theory (Q644498)

Rephrasing the authors words in the introduction, in many problems of mechanics, quantum physics, physics of wave processes, and other, the corresponding solutions are represented in the form of a series. This is more so since the advent of Quantum Mechanics, in fact, the properties of these series are very important in, e.g., the Dirac theory. But it turns out that the series which appear are complicated enough for studying their properties. That is why many physicists, including Dirac himself, which serves as a leading example in the paper, replaced sometimes those series by integrals. As the authors point out, the problem of the approximation of series by suitable functions was studied already by Euler and Poisson. However, in previous contributions the second author has shown that the initial series and the final integral for the case of the Dirac theory have different properties, in particular, different positions of their corresponding zeros. Thus, passing from the discrete to the approximate continuous formulation one loses certain properties of the original function. The authors wisely state that it is natural that the remainder resulting in the process can prevent the clarification of the behavior and properties of the series under study and that the conditions under which the influence of the remainder can be neglected should be found for every concrete case. In the paper this is done in the example of a very famous series as is the Riemann zeta-function. The authors call this process of going from the discrete to the continuum ``physical mathematics'', more specifically, the replacement of the series by the corresponding (approximate) integral and the results of such a replacement which follow in the theory of prime numbers. In the paper they first apply the above mentioned method to the Riemann zeta-function, obtaining in this way what they call a ``physical zeta'' function. Then they consider, under the same perspective, the issue of approximating the function \(\pi(x)\). Actually the problem of the behavior of the function \(\pi(x)\) and of its approximation in terms of ``good'' functions remains one of the oldest and most interesting problems in the theory of numbers. The paper provides a nice overview of the literature on the subject and ends up with interesting considerations on the general issue as translated to the Universe as a whole.