Does the average reciprocal of the smallest or largest prime factors of integers converge

analytic-number-theoryconvergence-divergencenumber theoryprime numbersreal-analysis

I have observed the following experimentally. Can this be proved for disproved?

Claim: Let $a_n$ and $b_n$ be the smallest and the largest prime factor of $n$ respectively. Then $\dfrac{n}{\sum_{k \le n}\frac{1}{a_k}}$ converges where as $\dfrac{n}{\sum_{k \le n}\frac{1}{b_k}}$ diverges. Does the former converge to any well known constant?

Experimental data

$(n, \frac{n}{\sum_{k \le n} 1/a_k}, \frac{n}{\sum_{k \le n} 1/b_k})$

(10000, 3.02993420841874, 49.7300995496866)
(50000, 3.02952018440647, 98.2799944602231)
(100000, 3.02941537598346, 130.729049014886)
(150000, 3.02938919782311, 154.155243236860)
(200000, 3.02938368245805, 173.039435925054)
(250000, 3.02937154845508, 189.191970394294) 
(1050000, 3.02936681682172, 331.238681812080)

Best Answer

First let me prove that $\dfrac{n}{\sum_{k \le n}\frac{1}{b_k}}$ diverges. It suffices to show the reciprocal $\dfrac{\sum_{k \le n}\frac{1}{b_k}}{n}$ converges to $0$. Fix $N\in\mathbb{N}$ and let $p_1,\dots,p_m$ be all the primes less than $N$. Note that then there is a constant $C$ such that for all $n>1$, at most $C\log(n)^m$ integers between $1$ and $n$ have only the primes $p_1,\dots,p_m$ in their prime factorization (for each $p_i$, there are at most $1+\log_{p_i} n$ choices for the power of $p_i$). Since $\frac{\log(n)^m}{n}\to 0$ as $n\to\infty$, the fraction of $k\leq n$ such that $b_k<N$ goes to $0$ as $n\to\infty$. So the contribution of such $k$ to the average $\dfrac{\sum_{k \le n}\frac{1}{b_k}}{n}$ goes to $0$, and thus $\limsup \dfrac{\sum_{k \le n}\frac{1}{b_k}}{n}\leq 1/N$. Since $N$ is arbitrary, this implies $\dfrac{\sum_{k \le n}\frac{1}{b_k}}{n}$ converges to $0$.

To prove that $\dfrac{n}{\sum_{k \le n}\frac{1}{a_k}}$ converges, we similarly analyze the reciprocal $\dfrac{\sum_{k \le n}\frac{1}{a_k}}{n}$. Let $p_i$ be the $i$th prime in order ($p_1=2,p_2=3,\dots$). For fixed $i$, note that as $n\to\infty$, the proportion of $k$ from $1$ to $n$ such that $a_k=p_i$ approaches the number $$r_i=\frac{1}{p_i}\prod_{j<i}(1-1/p_j)$$ (by the Chinese remainder theorem, this is the proportion of residues mod $\prod_{j\leq i} p_i$ that are divisible by $p_i$ but not by $p_j$ for any $j<i$). So for fixed $m$, when $n$ is sufficiently large, the proportion of $k$ such that $a_k=p_i$ will be arbitrarily close to $r_i$ for all $i\leq m$. This means the contribution of these terms to the average $\dfrac{\sum_{k \le n}\frac{1}{a_k}}{n}$ is arbitrarily close to $\sum_{i=1}^m\frac{r_i}{p_i}$. Note moreover that $1-\sum_{i=1}^mr_i=\prod_{i\leq m}(1-1/p_i)$ goes to $0$ as $m\to\infty$ (since $\sum_{i=1}^\infty 1/p_i$ diverges), so the contribution of the remaining terms (those with $a_k=p_i$ for $i>m$) becomes arbitrarily small as $m$ gets large. So fixing a sufficiently large $m$, for all sufficiently large $n$, $\dfrac{\sum_{k \le n}\frac{1}{a_k}}{n}$ will be arbitrarily close to $\sum_{i=1}^m\frac{r_i}{p_i}$. It follows that $\dfrac{\sum_{k \le n}\frac{1}{a_k}}{n}$ converges to the value $$\sum_{i=1}^\infty\frac{r_i}{p_i}$$ and so $\dfrac{n}{\sum_{k \le n}\frac{1}{a_k}}$ converges to its reciprocal.

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