Finding strong pseudoprimes to several bases

Define to be the smallest strong pseudoprime to all the first prime bases. If we know the exact value of , we will have, for integers , a deterministic primality testing algorithm which is not only easier to implement but also faster than either the Jacobi sum test or the elliptic curve test. Thanks to Pomerance et al. and Jaeschke, are known for . Upper bounds for were given by Jaeschke.

In this paper we tabulate all strong pseudoprimes (spsp's) to the first ten prime bases which have the form with odd primes and There are in total 44 such numbers, six of which are also spsp(31), and three numbers are spsp's to both bases 31 and 37. As a result the upper bounds for and are lowered from 28- and 29-decimal-digit numbers to 22-decimal-digit numbers, and a 24-decimal-digit upper bound for is obtained. The main tools used in our methods are the biquadratic residue characters and cubic residue characters. We propose necessary conditions for to be a strong pseudoprime to one or to several prime bases. Comparisons of effectiveness with both Jaeschke's and Arnault's methods are given.

     

Elliptic curves with nonsplit mod representations

We calculate explicitly the -invariants of the elliptic curves corresponding to rational points on the modular curve by giving an expression defined over of the -function in terms of the function field generators and of the elliptic curve . As a result we exhibit infinitely many elliptic curves over with nonsplit mod representations.

     

On the total number of prime factors of an odd perfect number

We say is perfect if , where denotes the sum of the positive divisors of . No odd perfect numbers are known, but it is well known that if such a number exists, it must have prime factorization of the form , where , , ..., are distinct primes and . We prove that if or for all , , then . We also prove as our main result that , where . This improves a result of Sayers given in 1986.

     

Two kinds of strong pseudoprimes up to

Let be an odd composite integer. Write with odd. If either mod or mod for some , then we say that is a strong pseudoprime to base , or spsp() for short. Define to be the smallest strong pseudoprime to all the first prime bases. If we know the exact value of , we will have, for integers , a deterministic efficient primality testing algorithm which is easy to implement. Thanks to Pomerance et al. and Jaeschke, the are known for . Conjectured values of were given by us in our previous papers (Math. Comp. 72 (2003), 2085-2097; 74 (2005), 1009-1024).

The main purpose of this paper is to give exact values of for ; to give a lower bound of : ; and to give reasons and numerical evidence of K2- and -spsp's to support the following conjecture: for any , where (resp. ) is the smallest K2- (resp. -) strong pseudoprime to all the first prime bases. For this purpose we describe procedures for computing and enumerating the two kinds of spsp's to the first 9 prime bases. The entire calculation took about 4000 hours on a PC Pentium IV/1.8GHz. (Recall that a K2-spsp is an spsp of the form: with primes and ; and that a -spsp is an spsp and a Carmichael number of the form: with each prime factor mod .)

     

On the absolute Mahler measure of polynomials having all zeros in a sector. II

Let be an algebraic integer of degree , not or a root of unity, all of whose conjugates are confined to a sector . In the paper On the absolute Mahler measure of polynomials having all zeros in a sector, G. Rhin and C. Smyth compute the greatest lower bound of the absolute Mahler measure ( of , for belonging to nine subintervals of . In this paper, we improve the result to thirteen subintervals of and extend some existing subintervals.

     

Class numbers of some abelian extensions of rational function fields

Let be a monic irreducible polynomial. In this paper we generalize the determinant formula for of Bae and Kang and the formula for of Jung and Ahn to any subfields of the cyclotomic function field By using these formulas, we calculate the class numbers of all subfields of when and are small.

     

Random Fibonacci sequences and the number

For the familiar Fibonacci sequence (defined by , and for ), increases exponentially with at a rate given by the golden ratio . But for a simple modification with both additions and subtractions - the random Fibonacci sequences defined by , and for , , where each sign is independent and either or - with probability - it is not even obvious if should increase with . Our main result is that

with probability . Finding the number involves the theory of random matrix products, Stern-Brocot division of the real line, a fractal measure, a computer calculation, and a rounding error analysis to validate the computer calculation.

     

Finding -strong pseudoprimes

Let be odd primes and . Put

Then we call the kernel, the triple the signature, and the height of , respectively. We call a -number if it is a Carmichael number with each prime factor . If is a -number and a strong pseudoprime to the bases for , we call a -spsp . Since -numbers have probability of error (the upper bound of that for the Rabin-Miller test), they often serve as the exact values or upper bounds of (the smallest strong pseudoprime to all the first prime bases). If we know the exact value of , we will have, for integers , a deterministic efficient primality testing algorithm which is easy to implement.

In this paper, we first describe an algorithm for finding -spsp(2)'s, to a given limit, with heights bounded. There are in total -spsp's with heights . We then give an overview of the 21978 - spsp(2)'s and tabulate of them, which are -spsp's to the first prime bases up to ; three numbers are spsp's to the first 11 prime bases up to 31. No -spsp's to the first prime bases with heights were found. We conjecture that there exist no -spsp's to the first prime bases with heights and so that

which was found by the author in an earlier paper. We give reasons to support the conjecture. The main idea of our method for finding those -spsp's is that we loop on candidates of signatures and kernels with heights bounded, subject those candidates of -spsp's and their prime factors to Miller's tests, and obtain the desired numbers. At last we speed our algorithm for finding larger -spsp's, say up to , with a given signature to more prime bases. Comparisons of effectiveness with Arnault's and our previous methods for finding -strong pseudoprimes to the first several prime bases are given.

     

Explicit values of multi-dimensional Kloosterman sums for prime powers, II

For any integer fix , and let denote the group of reduced residues modulo . Let , a power of a prime . The hyper-Kloosterman sums of dimension are defined for by

where denotes the multiplicative inverse of modulo .

Salie evaluated in the classical setting for even , and for odd with . Later, Smith provided formulas that simplified the computation of in these cases for . Recently, Cochrane, Liu and Zheng computed upper bounds for in the general case , stopping short of their explicit evaluation. Here I complete the computation they initiated to obtain explicit values for the Kloosterman sums for , relying on basic properties of some simple specialized exponential sums. The treatment here is more elementary than the author's previous determination of these Kloosterman sums using character theory and -adic methods. At the least, it provides an alternative, independent evaluation of the Kloosterman sums.

     

Double roots of power series and related matters

For a given collection of distinct arguments , multiplicities and a real interval containing zero, we are interested in determining the smallest for which there is a power series with coefficients in , and roots of order respectively. We denote this by . We describe the usual form of the extremal series (we give a sufficient condition which is also necessary when the extremal series possesses at least non-dependent coefficients strictly inside , where is 1 or 2 as is real or complex). We focus particularly on , the size of the smallest double root of a power series lying on a given ray (of interest in connection with the complex analogue of work of Boris Solomyak on the distribution of the random series ). We computed the value of for the rationals in of denominator less than fifty. The smallest value we encountered was . For the one-sided intervals and the corresponding smallest values were and .