Number Theory

The Hardy and Littlewood k-tuple prime conjecture is one of the most enduring unsolved problems in mathematics. In 1999, Gadiyar and Padma presented a heuristic derivation of the 2-tuples conjecture by employing the orthogonality principle of Ramanujan sums. Building upon their work, we explore triple convolution Ramanujan sums and use this approach to provide a heuristic derivation of the Hardy-Littlewood conjecture concerning prime 3-tuples. Furthermore, we estimate the triple convolution of the Jordan totient function using Ramanujan sums.

Let $\sigma^*(n)$ be the sum of all unitary (i.e. coprime) divisors of $n$. As an analogue of Lehmer’s totient problem, Subbarao proposed the following conjecture. The congruence $\sigma^*(n)\equiv 1\pmod{n}$ is possible iff $n$ is a prime power. This problem is still open. We strengthen considerably the lower estimations for the potential counterexamples to Subbarao’s conjecture.

In the second part of our talk, we discuss the growth of the function $\sigma^*(n)$. We establish a new explicit upper bound, namely $\sigma^*(n)<1.2678n\log\log{n}$ for all $n\ge223092870$. For this purpose, we use explicit estimates for Chebyshev’s $\theta$-function and for some product defined over prime numbers.

Given an abelian variety A defined over a number field, a conjecture attributed to Serre states that the set of primes at which A admits ordinary reduction is of positive density. This conjecture had been proved for elliptic curves (Serre, 1977), abelian surfaces (Katz 1982, Sawin 2016) and certain higher dimensional abelian varieties (Pink 1983, Fite 2021, etc).

In this talk, we will discuss ideas behind these results and recent progress for abelian varieties with non-trivial endomorphisms, including the case where A has almost complex multiplication by an abelian CM field, based on joint work with Cantoral-Farfan, Mantovan, Pries, and Tang.

Apart from ordinary reduction, we will also discuss the set of primes at which an abelian variety admits basic reduction, generalizing a result of Elkies on the infinitude of supersingular primes for elliptic curves. This is joint work with Mantovan, Pries, and Tang.

In 1979, Erdős conjectured that for $k \ge 9$, $2^k$ is not the sum of distinct powers of 3. That is, the set of powers of two (which is 2-automatic) and the 3-automatic set consisting of numbers whose ternary expansions omit 2 has finite intersection. In the theory of automata, a theorem of Cobham (1969) says that if $k$ and $\ell$ are two multiplicatively independent natural numbers then a subset of the natural numbers that is both $k-$ and $\ell$-automatic is eventually periodic. A multidimensional extension was later given by Semenov (1977). Motivated by Erdős' conjecture and in light of Cobham's theorem, we give a quantitative version of the Cobham-Semenov theorem for sparse automatic sets, showing that the intersection of a sparse k-automatic subset of $\mathbb{N}^d$ and a sparse $\ell$-automatic subset of $\mathbb{N}^d$ is finite. Moreover, we give effectively computable upper bounds on the size of the intersection in terms of data from the automata that accept these sets.

Idempotent semi-rings have been relevant in several branches of applied mathematics, like formal languages and combinatorial optimization.

They were brought recently to pure mathematics thanks to its link with tropical geometry, which is a relatively new branch of mathematics that has been useful in solving some problems and conjectures in classical algebraic geometry.

However, up to now we do not have a proper algebraic formalization of what could be called “Tropical Algebraic Geometry”, which is expected to be the geometry arising from idempotent semi-rings.

In this mini-course we aim to motivate the necessity for such theory, and we recast some old constructions in order theory in terms of commutative algebra of semi-rings and modules over them.

Mini-Course

This lecture is the second part of a mini-course, please see also

• Lecture 1