Dirichlet, Sierpiński, and Benford

Radix representation; digital problems (11A63) Distribution of primes (11N05) Other results on the distribution of values or the characterization of arithmetic functions (11N64)

Review text

A theorem of \textit{W. Sierpiński} [Acta Arith. 5, 265--266 (1959; Zbl 0094.25505)] says that if \(g\ge 2\), and if positive integers \(A\) and \(B\) are given, with \((B,g)=1\), then there are infinitely many primes whose expansion in base \(g\) begins with the digits of \(A\) and ends with the digits of \(B\). The first result in the paper extends this to a coprime pair of bases \(g,g'\). Given positive integers \(A,A',B,B'\) with \((B,g)=(B',g')=1\), there are infinitely many primes whose base \(g\) expansion begins with the digits of \(A\) and ends with the digits of \(B\) (to base \(g\)), and whose base \(g'\) expansion begins with the digits of \(A'\) and ends with the digits of \(B'\) (to base \(g'\)). Indeed it is shown that such primes have Dirichlet density \[ \frac{1}{\phi(g^{\ell})\phi(g'^{\ell'})} \frac{\log(1+1/A)}{\log g}\frac{\log(1+1/A')}{\log g'}, \] where \(A\) has \(\ell\) digits to base \(g\) and \(A'\) has \(\ell'\) digits to base \(g'\). The authors discuss variants in which the condition \((g,g')=1\) is weakened, and in which one has 3 or more bases. The appearance of \(\log(1+1/A)/\log g\) relates to Benford's Law, and the final section of the paper investigates this further. It is shown that the sequences of values of \(\phi(n)\), of \(\sigma(n)\), and of \(d(n)\), are each ``logarithmically Benford, so that, for example, the logarithmic density of integers \(n\) for which the base-10 expansion of \(\phi(n)\) begins with the digit \(A\), is \(\log(1+1/A)/\log 10\) for \(1\le A\le 9\).

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