About $\sum_{p \in \mathbb P}^{ }\frac{1}{\operatorname{lcm}\left(p,p+1\right)}$

119 Views Asked by At

Consider the following summation:

$$\sum_{p \in \mathbb P}^{ }\frac{1}{\operatorname{lcm}\left(p,p+1\right)}$$

Where $\mathbb P$ is the set of prime numbers.

The summation is bounded since:

$$\sum_{p \in \mathbb P}^{ }\frac{1}{\operatorname{lcm}\left(p,p+1\right)}<\sum_{k=2}^{\infty}\frac{1}{\operatorname{lcm}\left(k,k+1\right)}<\sum_{k=2}^{\infty}\frac{1}{\operatorname{lcm}\left(k,k^{2}\right)}=\sum_{k=2}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k^{2}}=\frac{\pi^{2}}{6}-1≈ 0.644934066848$$

Which follows from the Basel problem.

My question is what is the asymptotic behavior of this summation? is there any better upper bound?

1

There are 1 best solutions below

0
On

As has been pointed out in the comments, $\operatorname{lcm}(p,p+1)=p(p+1)$ for $p$ prime. Contrary to what has been written in the comments, the sum converges since the terms are $O\left(p^{-2}\right)$; the series cannot be split into separate sums using partial fraction decomposition because the terms of the individual sums would be $O\left(p^{-1}\right)$, so these sums don’t converge individually.

We have

\begin{eqnarray} \sum_p\frac1{p(p+1)} &=& \sum_p\frac1{p^2}\cdot\frac1{1+\frac1p} \\ &=& \sum_p\sum_{s=2}(-1)^sp^{-s} \\ &=& \sum_{s=2}(-1)^s\sum_pp^{-s} \\ &=& \sum_{s=2}(-1)^sP(s)\;, \end{eqnarray}

where $P(s)$ is the prime zeta function. Wolfram|Alpha evaluates this sum to approximately $0.33023$.