Let ${𝒫}_r$ denote an almost-prime with at most $r$ prime factors, counted according to multiplicity. Suppose that $a$ and $q$ are positive integers satisfying $(a,q)=1$. Denote by ${𝒫}_2(a,q)$ the least almost-prime ${𝒫}_2$ which satisfies ${𝒫}_2\equiv a(modq)$. It is proved that for sufficiently large $q$, there holds $${𝒫}_2(a,q)\ll q^{1.8345}.$$ This result constitutes an improvement upon that of Iwaniec (1982), who obtained the same conclusion, but for the range $1.845$ in place of $1.8345$.

Let $a$ and $b\in \mathbb{N}$. Denote by $R_{a,b}$ the set of all integers $n>1$ whose canonical prime representation $n=p_1^{{\alpha }_1}{p}_2^{{\alpha }_2}\cdots p_r^{{\alpha }_r}$ has all exponents ${\alpha }_i$ $(1\le i\le r)$ being a multiple of $a$ or belonging to the arithmetic progression $at+b$, $t\in {\mathbb{N}}_0:=\mathbb{N}\cup \left\{0\right\}$. All integers in $R_{a,b}$ are called generalized square-full integers. Using the exponent pair method, an upper bound for character sums over generalized square-full integers is derived. An application on the distribution of generalized square-full integers in an arithmetic progression is given. ...

Given an integer $n\ge 3$, let $u_1,...,u_n$ be pairwise coprime integers $\ge 2$, $𝒟$ a family of nonempty proper subsets of $\{1,...,n\}$ with “enough” elements, and $\epsilon$ a function $𝒟\to \{\pm 1\}$. Does there exist at least one prime $q$ such that $q$ divides ${\prod }_{i\in I}{u}_i-\epsilon \left(I\right)$ for some $I\in 𝒟$, but it does not divide $u_1\cdots u_n$? We answer this question in the positive when the $u_i$ are prime powers and $\epsilon$ and $𝒟$ are subjected to certain restrictions. We use the result to prove that, if ${\epsilon }_0\in \{\pm 1\}$ and $A$ is a set of three or more primes that contains all prime divisors of any...

We consider the equation $$-y^{\text{'}}\left(x\right)+q\left(x\right)y(x-\varphi \left(x\right))=f\left(x\right),x\in ℝ,$$ where $\varphi$ and $q$ ($q\ge 1$) are positive continuous functions for all $x\in ℝ$ and $f\in C\left(ℝ\right)$. By a solution of the equation we mean any function $y$, continuously differentiable everywhere in $ℝ$, which satisfies the equation for all $x\in ℝ$. We show that under certain additional conditions on the functions $\varphi$ and $q$, the above equation has a unique solution $y$, satisfying the inequality $$\parallel y^{\text{'}}{\parallel }_{C\left(ℝ\right)}+{\parallel qy\parallel }_{C\left(ℝ\right)}\le c{\parallel f\parallel }_{C\left(ℝ\right)},$$ where the constant $c\in (0,\infty )$ does not depend on the choice of $f$.

Let $r(G_1,G_2)$ be the Ramsey number of the two graphs $G_1$ and $G_2$. For $n_1\ge n_2\ge 1$ let $S(n_1,n_2)$ be the double star given by $V\left(S(n_1,n_2)\right)=\{v_0,v_1,...,v_{n_1},w_0$, $w_1,...,w_{n_2}\}$ and $E\left(S(n_1,n_2)\right)=\{v_0{v}_1,...,v_0{v}_{n_1},v_0{w}_0,w_0{w}_1,...,w_0{w}_{n_2}\}$. We determine $r(K_{1,m-1},$ $S(n_1,n_2))$ under certain conditions. For $n\ge 6$ let $T_n^3=S(n-5,3)$, $T_n^{\text{'}\text{'}}=(V,E_2)$ and $T_n^{\text{'}\text{'}\text{'}}=(V,E_3)$, where $V=\{v_0,v_1,...,v_{n-1}\}$, $E_2=\{v_0{v}_1,...,v_0{v}_{n-4},v_1{v}_{n-3}$, $v_1{v}_{n-2},v_2{v}_{n-1}\}$ and $E_3=\{v_0{v}_1,...,v_0{v}_{n-4},v_1{v}_{n-3},$ $v_2{v}_{n-2},v_3{v}_{n-1}\}$. We also obtain explicit formulas for $r(K_{1,m-1},T_n)$, $r(T_m^{\text{'}},T_n)$ $(n\ge m+3)$, $r(T_n,T_n)$, $r(T_n^{\text{'}},T_n)$ and $r(P_n,T_n)$, where $T_n\in \{T_n^{\text{'}\text{'}},T_n^{\text{'}\text{'}\text{'}},T_n^3\}$, $P_n$ is the path on $n$ vertices and $T_n^{\text{'}}$ is the unique tree with $n$ vertices and maximal degree $n-2$.

Let $G$ be a group and $\omega \left(G\right)$ be the set of element orders of $G$. Let $k\in \omega \left(G\right)$ and $m_k\left(G\right)$ be the number of elements of order $k$ in $G$. Let nse$\left(G\right)=\{m_k\left(G\right):k\in \omega \left(G\right)\}$. Assume $r$ is a prime number and let $G$ be a group such that nse$\left(G\right)=$ nse$\left(S_r\right)$, where $S_r$ is the symmetric group of degree $r$. In this paper we prove that $G\cong S_r$, if $r$ divides the order of $G$ and $r^2$ does not divide it. To get the conclusion we make use of some well-known results on the prime graphs of finite simple groups and their components.

It is proved that real functions on $ℝ$ which can be represented as the difference of two semiconvex functions with a general modulus (or of two lower $C^1$-functions, or of two strongly paraconvex functions) coincide with semismooth functions on $ℝ$ (i.e. those locally Lipschitz functions on $ℝ$ for which $f_{+}^{\text{'}}\left(x\right)={lim}_{t\to x+}{f}_{+}^{\text{'}}\left(t\right)$ and $f_{-}^{\text{'}}\left(x\right)={lim}_{t\to x-}{f}_{-}^{\text{'}}\left(t\right)$ for each $x$). Further, for each modulus $\omega$, we characterize the class $DS{C}_{\omega }$ of functions on $ℝ$ which can be written as $f=g-h$, where $g$ and $h$ are semiconvex with modulus $C\omega$ (for some $C>0$) using a new...

We use the estimation of the number of integers $n$ such that $\lfloor n^c\rfloor$ belongs to an arithmetic progression to study the coprimality of integers in ${\mathbb{N}}^c={\left\{\lfloor n^c\rfloor \right\}}_{n\in \mathbb{N}}$, $c>1$, $c\notin \mathbb{N}$.

A geometric progression of length k and integer ratio is a set of numbers of the form $a,ar,...,a{r}^{k-1}$ for some positive real number a and integer r ≥ 2. For each integer k ≥ 3, a greedy algorithm is used to construct a strictly decreasing sequence ${\left(a_i\right)}_{i=1}^{\infty }$ of positive real numbers with a₁ = 1 such that the set $G^{\left(k\right)}={\bigcup }_{i=1}^{\infty }(a_{2i},a_{2i-1}]$ contains no geometric progression of length k and integer ratio. Moreover, $G^{\left(k\right)}$ is a maximal subset of (0,1] that contains no geometric progression of length k and integer ratio. It is also proved that...

We prove that almost all positive even integers $n$ can be represented as $p_2^2+p_3^3+p_4^4+p_5^5$ with $|p_k^k-\frac{1}{4}N|\le N^{1-1/54+\epsilon }$ for $2\le k\le 5$. As a consequence, we show that each sufficiently large odd integer $N$ can be written as $p_1+p_2^2+p_3^3+p_4^4+p_5^5$ with $|p_k^k-\frac{1}{5}N|\le N^{1-1/54+\epsilon }$ for $1\le k\le 5$.

A natural number $n$ is said to be a $(k,r)$-integer if $n=a^{k}b$, where $k>r>1$ and $b$ is not divisible by the $r$th power of any prime. We study the distribution of such $(k,r)$-integers in the Piatetski-Shapiro sequence $\left\{\lfloor n^c\rfloor \right\}$ with $c>1$. As a corollary, we also obtain similar results for semi-$r$-free integers.

The Golomb space ${\mathbb{N}}_{\tau }$ is the set $\mathbb{N}$ of positive integers endowed with the topology $\tau$ generated by the base consisting of arithmetic progressions $\{a+bn:n\ge 0\}$ with coprime $a,b$. We prove that the Golomb space ${\mathbb{N}}_{\tau }$ is topologically rigid in the sense that its homeomorphism group is trivial. This resolves a problem posed by T. Banakh at Mathoverflow in 2017.

Let $k\ge 5$ be an odd integer and $\eta$ be any given real number. We prove that if ${\lambda }_1$, ${\lambda }_2$, ${\lambda }_3$, ${\lambda }_4$, $\mu$ are nonzero real numbers, not all of the same sign, and ${\lambda }_1/{\lambda }_2$ is irrational, then for any real number $\sigma$ with $0<\sigma <1/\left(8\vartheta \right(k\left)\right)$, the inequality $$|{\lambda }_1{p}_1^2+{\lambda }_2{p}_2^2+{\lambda }_3{p}_3^2+{\lambda }_4{p}_4^2+\mu p_5^k+\eta |<{\left(\underset{1\le j\le 5}{max}{p}_j\right)}^{-\sigma }$$ has infinitely many solutions in prime variables $p_1,p_2,\cdots ,p_5$, where $\vartheta \left(k\right)=3\times 2^{(k-5)/2}$ for $k=5,7,9$ and $\vartheta \left(k\right)=[(k^2+2k+5)/8]$ for odd integer $k$ with $k\ge 11$. This improves a recent result in W. Ge, T. Wang (2018).