The sharp threshold for making squares

Paul Balister¹ ; Béla Bollobás² ; Robert Morris³

¹ Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA
² Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, Cambridge, United Kingdom and Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA and London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, London, United Kingdom
³ IMPA, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Annals of mathematics, Tome 188 (2018) no. 1, pp. 49-143

Résumé

Consider a random sequence of $N$ integers, each chosen uniformly and independently from the set $\{1,…,x\}$. Motivated by applications to factorization algorithms such as Dixon’s algorithm, the quadratic sieve, and the number field sieve, Pomerance in 1994 posed the following problem: how large should $N$ be so that, with high probability, this sequence contains a subsequence, the product of whose elements is a perfect square? Pomerance determined asymptotically the logarithm of the threshold for this event and conjectured that it in fact exhibits a \emph sharp threshold in\nonbreakingspace $N$. More recently, Croot, Granville, Pemantle and Tetali determined the threshold up to a factor of $4/\pi + o(1)$ as $x \to \infty $ and made a conjecture regarding the location of the sharp threshold. \par In this paper we prove both of these conjectures by determining the sharp threshold for making squares. Our proof combines techniques from combinatorics, probability and analytic number theory; in particular, we use the so-called method of self-correcting martingales in order to control the size of the 2-core of the random hypergraph that encodes the prime factors of our random numbers. Our method also gives a new (and completely different) proof of the upper bound in the main theorem of Croot, Granville, Pemantle and Tetali.

Détail

DOI : 10.4007/annals.2018.188.1.2