On Erd\H{o}s sums of almost primes

Authors Ofir Gorodetsky, Jared Duker Lichtman, Mo Dick Wong

Publication date 14 March 2023

Multiplicative structure; Euclidean algorithm; greatest common divisors (11A05) Distribution of integers with specified multiplicative constraints (11N25) Evaluation of number-theoretic constants (11Y60) Self-similar stochastic processes (60G18) Random operators and equations (aspects of stochastic analysis) (60H25)

Abstract: In 1935, ErdH{o}s proved the sums

f_{k} = s u m_{n} 1 / (n l o g n)

, over integers

n

with exactly

k

prime factors, are uniformly bounded, and in 1993 Zhang proved

f_{k}

is maximized by the prime sum

f_{1} = s u m_{p} 1 / (p l o g p)

. According to a 2013 conjecture of Banks and Martin, the sums

f_{k}

are predicted to decrease monotonically in

k

. In this article, we show the sums restricted to odd integers are indeed monotonically decreasing in

k

, sufficiently large. By contrast, contrary to the conjecture we prove the sums

f_{k}

increase monotonically in

k

, sufficiently large. Our main result gives an asymptotic for

f_{k}

which identifies the (negative) secondary term, i.e.

f_{k} = 1 - (a + o (1)) k^{2} / 2^{k}

for an explicit constant

a = .0656 c d o t s

. This is proven by a refined method combining real and complex analysis, while the classical results of Sathe and Selberg on products of

k

primes imply the weaker estimate

f_{k} = 1 + O_{v a r e p s i l o n} (k^{v a r e p s i l o n - 1 / 2})

. We also give an alternate, probability-theoretic argument related to the Dickman distribution. Here the proof reduces to showing a new sequence of integrals converges to

e^{- g a m m a}

, which may be of independent interest.

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