COUNTING THE NUMBER OF SOLUTIONS TO THE ERDŐS–STRAUS EQUATION ON UNIT FRACTIONS

By Christian Elsholtz, Terence Tao. Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society, 2011

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Abstract For any positive integer $n$, let $f(n)$ denote the number of solutions to the Diophantine equation $$\begin{eqnarray*}\frac{4}{n} = \frac{1}{x} + \frac{1}{y} + \frac{1}{z}\end{eqnarray*}$$ with $x, y, z$ positive integers. The Erdős–Straus conjecture asserts that $f(n)\gt 0$ for every $n\geq 2$. In this paper we obtain a number of upper and lower bounds for $f(n)$ or $f(p)$ for typical values of natural numbers $n$ and primes $p$. For instance, we establish that $$\begin{eqnarray*}N\hspace{0.167em} {\mathop{\log }\nolimits }^{2} N\ll \displaystyle \sum _{p\leq N}f(p)\ll N\hspace{0.167em} {\mathop{\log }\nolimits }^{2} N\log \log N.\end{eqnarray*}$$ These upper and lower bounds show that a typical prime has a small number of solutions to the Erdős–Straus Diophantine equation; small, when compared with other additive problems, like Waring’s problem.

Subfields: Algebra and Number Theory, Geometry and Topology, Mathematical Physics

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