Non-vanishing of Dirichlet series without Euler products

We give a new proof that the Riemann zeta function is nonzero in the half-plane $\{s\in{\mathbb C}:\sigma>1\}$. A novel feature of this proof is that it makes no use of the Euler product for $\zeta(s)$.Comment: 13 pages; some minor edits of the previous versio

Sums and Products with Smooth Numbers

We estimate the sizes of the sumset A + A and the productset A $\cdot$ A in the special case that A = S (x, y), the set of positive integers n less than or equal to x, free of prime factors exceeding y.Comment: 12 page

Optimal primitive sets with restricted primes

A set of natural numbers is primitive if no element of the set divides another. Erd\H{o}s conjectured that if S is any primitive set, then \sum_{n\in S} 1/(n log n) \le \sum_{n\in \P} 1/(p log p), where \P denotes the set of primes. In this paper, we make progress towards this conjecture by restricting the setting to smaller sets of primes. Let P denote any subset of \P, and let N(P) denote the set of natural numbers all of whose prime factors are in P. We say that P is Erd\H{o}s-best among primitive subsets of N(P) if the inequality \sum_{n\in S} 1/(n log n) \le \sum_{n\in P} 1/(p log p) holds for every primitive set S contained in N(P). We show that if the sum of the reciprocals of the elements of P is small enough, then P is Erd\H{o}s-best among primitive subsets of N(P). As an application, we prove that the set of twin primes exceeding 3 is Erd\H{o}s-best among the corresponding primitive sets. This problem turns out to be related to a similar problem involving multiplicative weights. For any real number t>1, we say that P is t-best among primitive subsets of N(P) if the inequality \sum_{n\in S} n^{-t} \le \sum_{n\in P} p^{-t} holds for every primitive set S contained in N(P). We show that if the sum on the right-hand side of this inequality is small enough, then P is t-best among primitive subsets of N(P).Comment: 10 page

Sato--Tate, cyclicity, and divisibility statistics on average for elliptic curves of small height

We obtain asymptotic formulae for the number of primes $p\le x$ for which the reduction modulo $p$ of the elliptic curve \E_{a,b} : Y^2 = X^3 + aX + b satisfies certain ``natural'' properties, on average over integers $a$ and $b$ with $|a|\le A$ and $|b| \le B$, where $A$ and $B$ are small relative to $x$. Specifically, we investigate behavior with respect to the Sato--Tate conjecture, cyclicity, and divisibility of the number of points by a fixed integer $m$