Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
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Coprime sums as partitions of prime support
Use the formulation of Problem 878 with summands and no prescribed number of summands. The following arguments are recorded by Plasma AI without independent review.
For , let be its set of prime divisors. For each nonempty , define
The set is nonempty because . Pairwise coprime summands have disjoint prime supports. A maximizing family uses every prime in : if is missing, the additional summand strictly increases its sum. Conversely, choosing the maximizing integer for each block of a partition of gives a legal family. Thus
In particular,
If one inequality fails, its block together with the remaining singleton blocks improves on . If all hold, summing over any partition bounds its value by . Bounded exponent enumeration computes every , so this is an exhaustive finite criterion for a specified .
For , the singleton maxima for are respectively , with sum . The pair maxima are:
| Support | Maximum | Maximum plus the other singletons |
|---|---|---|
| 192 | 366 | |
| 200 | 330 | |
| 196 | 402 | |
| 135 | 312 | |
| 189 | 442 | |
| 175 | 384 |
These values follow by enumerating the positive exponent of the larger prime, then taking the largest admissible power of the smaller one. In the row order above the possible larger-prime exponents are ; ; ; ; ; and . The corresponding candidate maxima are , , , , , and .
Two pair blocks sum to at most . A triple block and a singleton sum to at most , and the four-prime block is at most . Together with the all-singleton partition and the six rows, these cases exhaust all partitions of four primes. The family attains , so
This calculation does not establish the separate reported assertion . Nor does it count the equality cases as varies. Such a count needs uniform information on the competition between the block weights, not merely a finite test at each input. The source Erdős's 1984 paper supplies density-one and limsup results and an upper bound for ; those have the scopes stated on the problem page. Its Theorem 8 is stated without a proof in that paper and is not a proved premise of this argument.