26 research outputs found
On sets of integers which contain no three terms in geometric progression
The problem of looking for subsets of the natural numbers which contain no
3-term arithmetic progressions has a rich history. Roth's theorem famously
shows that any such subset cannot have positive upper density. In contrast,
Rankin in 1960 suggested looking at subsets without three-term geometric
progressions, and constructed such a subset with density about 0.719. More
recently, several authors have found upper bounds for the upper density of such
sets. We significantly improve upon these bounds, and demonstrate a method of
constructing sets with a greater upper density than Rankin's set. This
construction is optimal in the sense that our method gives a way of effectively
computing the greatest possible upper density of a geometric-progression-free
set. We also show that geometric progressions in Z/nZ behave more like Roth's
theorem in that one cannot take any fixed positive proportion of the integers
modulo a sufficiently large value of n while avoiding geometric progressions.Comment: 16 page
The distribution of intermediate prime factors
Let denote the middle prime factor of
(taking into account multiplicity). More generally, one can consider, for any
, the -positioned prime factor of ,
. It has previously been shown that has normal order , and its values follow a
Gaussian distribution around this value. We extend this work by obtaining an
asymptotic formula for the count of for which ,
for primes in a wide range up to . We give several applications of these
results, including an exploration of the geometric mean of the middle prime
factors, for which we find that , where is the golden
ratio, and is an explicit constant. Along the way, we obtain an extension
of Lichtman's recent work on the ``dissected'' Mertens' theorem sums
for large values of