The third largest prime divisor of an odd perfect number exceeds one hundred

Let denote the sum of positive divisors of the natural number . Such a number is said to be perfect if . It is well known that a number is even and perfect if and only if it has the form where is prime.

It is unknown whether or not odd perfect numbers exist, although many conditions necessary for their existence have been found. For example, Cohen and Hagis have shown that the largest prime divisor of an odd perfect number must exceed , and Iannucci showed that the second largest must exceed . In this paper, we prove that the third largest prime divisor of an odd perfect number must exceed 100.

     

Corrigenda to ``New primitive whose degree is a Mersenne exponent,' and some new primitive pentanomials

We report an error in our previous paper [#!K1!#], where we announced that we listed all the primitive trinomials over of degree 859433, but there is a bug in the sieve. We missed the primitive trinomial and its reciprocal, as pointed out by Richard Brent et al. We also report some new primitive pentanomials.

     

Littlewood polynomials with high order zeros

Let be the minimal length of a polynomial with coefficients divisible by . Byrnes noted that for each , and asked whether in fact . Boyd showed that for all , but . He further showed that , and that is one of the 5 numbers , or . Here we prove that . Similarly, let be the maximal power of dividing some polynomial of degree with coefficients. Boyd was able to find for . In this paper we determine for .

     

Salem numbers of negative trace

We prove that, for all , there are Salem numbers of degree and trace , and that the number of such Salem numbers is . As a consequence, it follows that the number of totally positive algebraic integers of degree and trace is also .

     

The Postage Stamp Problem: An algorithm to determine the

Given an integral ``stamp" basis with and a positive integer , we define the -range as

. For given and , the extremal basis has the largest possible extremal -range

We give an algorithm to determine the -range. We prove some properties of the -range formula, and we conjecture its form for the extremal -range. We consider parameter bases , where the basis elements are given functions of . For we conjecture the extremal parameter bases for .

     

A fast algorithm for testing reducibility of trinomials mod 2 and some new primitive trinomials of degree 3021377

The standard algorithm for testing reducibility of a trinomial of prime degree over requires bits of memory. We describe a new algorithm which requires only bits of memory and significantly fewer memory references and bit-operations than the standard algorithm.

If is a Mersenne prime, then an irreducible trinomial of degree is necessarily primitive. We give primitive trinomials for the Mersenne exponents , , and . The results for extend and correct some computations of Kumada et al. The two results for are primitive trinomials of the highest known degree.

     

Computing rational points on rank 1 elliptic curves via -series and canonical heights

Let be an elliptic curve of rank 1. We describe an algorithm which uses the value of and the theory of canonical heghts to efficiently search for points in and . For rank 1 elliptic curves of moderately large conductor (say on the order of to ) and with a generator having moderately large canonical height (say between 13 and 50), our algorithm is the first practical general purpose method for determining if the set contains non-torsion points.

     

The number of primes is finite

For a positive integer let and let . The number of primes of the form is finite, because if , then is divisible by . The heuristic argument is given by which there exists a prime such that for all large ; a computer check however shows that this prime has to be greater than . The conjecture that the numbers are squarefree is not true because .

     

On the modular curves

Let denote an elliptic curve over and the modular curve classifying the elliptic curves over such that the representations of in the 7-torsion points of and of are symplectically isomorphic. In case is given by a Weierstraß equation such that the invariant is a square, we exhibit here nontrivial points of . From this we deduce an infinite family of curves for which has at least four nontrivial points.

     

A priori error estimates for Galerkin approximations to porous medium and fast diffusion equations

Galerkin approximations to solutions of a Cauchy-Dirichlet problem governed by the generalized porous medium equation

on bounded convex domains are considered. The range of the parameter includes the fast diffusion case . Using an Euler finite difference approximation in time, the semi-discrete solution is shown to converge to the exact solution in norm with an error controlled by for and for . For the fully discrete problem, a global convergence rate of in norm is shown for the range . For , a rate of is shown in norm.

     

Analysis of PSLQ, an integer relation finding algorithm

Let be either the real, complex, or quaternion number system and let be the corresponding integers. Let be a vector in . The vector has an integer relation if there exists a vector , , such that . In this paper we define the parameterized integer relation construction algorithm PSLQ, where the parameter can be freely chosen in a certain interval. Beginning with an arbitrary vector , iterations of PSLQ will produce lower bounds on the norm of any possible relation for . Thus PSLQ can be used to prove that there are no relations for of norm less than a given size. Let be the smallest norm of any relation for . For the real and complex case and each fixed parameter in a certain interval, we prove that PSLQ constructs a relation in less than iterations.

     

Tables of curves with many points

These tables record results on curves with many points over finite fields. For relatively small genus () and a small power of or we give in two tables the best presently known bounds for , the maximum number of rational points on a smooth absolutely irreducible projective curve of genus over a field of cardinality . In additional tables we list for a given pair the type of construction of the best curve so far, and we give a reference to the literature where such a curve can be found.

     

A new bound for the smallest

Let denote the number of primes and let denote the usual integral logarithm of . We prove that there are at least integer values of in the vicinity of with . This improves earlier bounds of Skewes, Lehman, and te Riele. We also plot more than 10000 values of in four different regions, including the regions discovered by Lehman, te Riele, and the authors of this paper, and a more distant region in the vicinity of , where appears to exceed by more than . The plots strongly suggest, although upper bounds derived to date for are not sufficient for a proof, that exceeds for at least integers in the vicinity of . If it is possible to improve our bound for by finding a sign change before , our first plot clearly delineates the potential candidates. Finally, we compute the logarithmic density of and find that as departs from the region in the vicinity of , the density is , and that it varies from this by no more than over the next integers. This should be compared to Rubinstein and Sarnak.

     

Extrapolation methods and derivatives of limits of sequences

Let be an infinite sequence whose limit or antilimit can be approximated very efficiently by applying a suitable extrapolation method E to . Assume that the and hence also are differentiable functions of some parameter , being the limit or antilimit of , and that we need to approximate . A direct way of achieving this would be by applying again a suitable extrapolation method E to the sequence , and this approach has often been used efficiently in various problems of practical importance. Unfortunately, as has been observed at least in some important cases, when and have essentially different asymptotic behaviors as , the approximations to produced by this approach, despite the fact that they are good, do not converge as quickly as those obtained for , and this is puzzling. In this paper we first give a rigorous mathematical explanation of this phenomenon for the cases in which E is the Richardson extrapolation process and E is a generalization of it, thus showing that the phenomenon has very little to do with numerics. Following that, we propose a procedure that amounts to first applying the extrapolation method E to and then differentiating the resulting approximations to , and we provide a thorough convergence and stability analysis in conjunction with the Richardson extrapolation process. It follows from this analysis that the new procedure for has practically the same convergence properties as E for . We show that a very efficient way of implementing the new procedure is by actually differentiating the recursion relations satisfied by the extrapolation method used, and we derive the necessary algorithm for the Richardson extrapolation process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the new approach with numerical examples that also support the theory. We discuss the application of this approach to numerical integration in the presence of endpoint singularities. We also discuss briefly its application in conjunction with other extrapolation methods.

     

Upper bounds for the prime divisors of Wendt's determinant

Let be an even integer, . The resultant of the polynomials and is known as Wendt's determinant of order . We prove that among the prime divisors of only those which divide or can be larger than , where and is the th Lucas number, except when and . Using this estimate we derive criteria for the nonsolvability of Fermat's congruence.

     

Maximum excursion and stopping time record-holders for the problem: Computational results

This paper presents some results concerning the search for initial values to the so-called problem which give rise either to function iterates that attain a maximum value higher than all function iterates for all smaller initial values, or which have a stopping time higher than those of all smaller initial values. Our computational results suggest that for an initial value of , the maximum value of the function iterates is bounded from above by , with either a constant or a very slowly increasing function of . As a by-product of this (exhaustive) search, which was performed up to , the conjecture was verified up to that same number.

     

Computation of relative class numbers of CM-fields by using Hecke -functions

We develop an efficient technique for computing values at of Hecke -functions. We apply this technique to the computation of relative class numbers of non-abelian CM-fields which are abelian extensions of some totally real subfield . We note that the smaller the degree of the more efficient our technique is. In particular, our technique is very efficient whenever instead of simply choosing (the maximal totally real subfield of ) we can choose real quadratic. We finally give examples of computations of relative class numbers of several dihedral CM-fields of large degrees and of several quaternion octic CM-fields with large discriminants.

     

Uniform convergence results for the mortar finite element method

The mortar finite element is an example of a non-conforming method which can be used to decompose and re-compose a domain into subdomains without requiring compatibility between the meshes on the separate components. We obtain stability and convergence results for this method that are uniform in terms of both the degree and the mesh used, without assuming quasiuniformity for the meshes. Our results establish that the method is optimal when non-quasiuniform or methods are used. Such methods are essential in practice for good rates of convergence when the interface passes through a corner of the domain. We also give an error estimate for when the version is used. Numerical results for and mortar FEMs show that these methods behave as well as conforming FEMs. An extension theorem is also proved.

     

Zeros of 2-adic -functions and congruences for class numbers and fundamental units

We study the imaginary quadratic fields such that the Iwasawa -invariant equals 1, obtaining information on zeros of -adic -functions and relating this to congruences for fundamental units and class numbers.

     

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 .