We investigate, for given positive integers a and b, the least positive integer $c=c(a,b)$ such that the quotient $\varphi (c!\kern-1.2pt)/\varphi (a!\kern-1.2pt)\varphi (b!\kern-1.2pt)$ is an integer. We derive results on the limit of $c(a,b)/(a+b)$ as a and b tend to infinity and show that $c(a,b)>a+b$ for all pairs of positive integers $(a,b)$ , with the exception of a set of density zero.

For a set A of positive integers and any positive integer n, let $R_{1}(A, n)$ , $R_{2}(A,n)$ and $R_{3}(A,n)$ denote the number of solutions of $a+a^{\prime }=n$ with $a, a^{\prime }\in A$ and the additional restriction that $a<a^{\prime }$ for $R_{2}$ and $a\leq a^{\prime }$ for $R_{3}$ . We consider Problem 6 of Erdős et al. [‘On additive properties of general sequences’, Discrete Math. 136 (1994), 75–99] about locally small and locally large values of $R_{1}, R_{2}$ and $R_{3}$ .

For a subset S of nonnegative integers and a vector $\mathbf {a}=(a_1,\ldots ,a_k)$ of positive integers, define the set $V^{\prime }_S(\mathbf {a})=\{ a_1s_1+\cdots +a_ks_k : s_i\in S\}-\{0\}$ . For a positive integer n, let $\mathcal T(n)$ be the set of integers greater than or equal to n. We consider the problem of finding all vectors $\mathbf {a}$ satisfying $V^{\prime }_S(\mathbf {a})=\mathcal T(n)$ when S is the set of (generalised) m-gonal numbers and n is a positive integer. In particular, we completely resolve the case when S is the set of triangular numbers.

We answer some questions in a paper by Kaneko and Koike [‘On modular forms arising from a differential equation of hypergeometric type’, Ramanujan J. 7(1–3) (2003), 145–164] about the modularity of the solutions of a certain differential equation. In particular, we provide a number-theoretic explanation of why the modularity of the solutions occurs in some cases and does not occur in others. This also proves their conjecture on the completeness of the list of modular solutions after adding some missing cases.

In the field of formal power series over a finite field, we prove a result which enables us to construct explicit examples of $U_{m}$ -numbers by using continued fraction expansions of algebraic formal power series of degree $m>1$ .

For any x in $[0,1)$ , let $[a_1(x),a_2(x),a_3(x),\ldots ]$ be its continued fraction. Let $\psi :\mathbb {N}\to \mathbb {R}^+$ be such that $\psi (n) \to \infty $ as $n\to \infty $ . For any positive integers s and t, we study the set

$$ \begin{align*}E(\psi)=\{(x,y)\in [0,1)^2: \max\{a_{sn}(x), a_{tn}(y)\}\ge \psi(n) \ {\text{for all sufficiently large}}\ n\in \mathbb{N}\} \end{align*} $$

and determine its Hausdorff dimension.

In this note, by introducing a new variant of the resonator function, we give an explicit version of the lower bound for $\log |L(\sigma ,\chi )|$ in the strip $1/2<\sigma <1$ , which improves the result of Aistleitner et al. [‘On large values of $L(\sigma ,\chi )$ ’, Q. J. Math. 70 (2019), 831–848].

Let f be an elliptic modular form and p an odd prime that is coprime to the level of f. We study the link between divisors of the characteristic ideal of the p-primary fine Selmer group of f over the cyclotomic $\mathbb {Z}_p$ extension of $\mathbb {Q}$ and the greatest common divisor of signed Selmer groups attached to f defined using the theory of Wach modules. One of the key ingredients of our proof is a generalisation of a result of Wingberg on the structure of fine Selmer groups of abelian varieties with supersingular reduction at p to the context of modular forms.

Let R be a commutative ring with identity which is not an integral domain. An ideal I of R is called an annihilating ideal if there exists $r\in R- \{0\}$ such that $Ir=(0)$ . The total graph of nonzero annihilating ideals of R is the graph $\Omega (R)$ whose vertices are the nonzero annihilating ideals of R and two distinct vertices $I,J$ are joined if and only if $I+J$ is also an annihilating ideal of R. We study the strong metric dimension of $\Omega (R)$ and evaluate it in several cases.

Let G be a finite solvable group and let p be a prime divisor of $|G|$ . We prove that if every monomial monolithic character degree of G is divisible by p, then G has a normal p-complement and, if p is relatively prime to every monomial monolithic character degree of G, then G has a normal Sylow p-subgroup. We also classify all finite solvable groups having a unique imprimitive monolithic character.

We say that a subgroup H is isolated in a group G if for each $x\in G$ either $x\in H$ or $\langle x\rangle \cap H={1}$ . We determine the structure of finite p-groups with isolated minimal nonabelian subgroups and finite p-groups with an isolated metacyclic subgroup.

We begin the study of Hankel matrices whose entries are logarithmic coefficients of univalent functions and give sharp bounds for the second Hankel determinant of logarithmic coefficients of convex and starlike functions.

We extend our study of variability regions, Ali et al. [‘An application of Schur algorithm to variability regions of certain analytic functions–I’, Comput. Methods Funct. Theory, to appear] from convex domains to starlike domains. Let $\mathcal {CV}(\Omega )$ be the class of analytic functions f in ${\mathbb D}$ with $f(0)=f'(0)-1=0$ satisfying $1+zf''(z)/f'(z) \in {\Omega }$ . As an application of the main result, we determine the variability region of $\log f'(z_0)$ when f ranges over $\mathcal {CV}(\Omega )$ . By choosing a particular $\Omega $ , we obtain the precise variability regions of $\log f'(z_0)$ for some well-known subclasses of analytic and univalent functions.

We prove that the Fridman invariant defined using the Carathéodory pseudodistance does not always go to 1 near strongly Levi pseudoconvex boundary points and it always goes to 0 near nonpseudoconvex boundary points. We also discuss whether Fridman invariants can be extended continuously to some boundary points of domains constructed by deleting compact subsets from other domains.

We prove that for a Banach algebra A having a bounded $\mathcal {Z}(A)$ -approximate identity and for every $\mathbf {[IN]}$ group G with a weight w which is either constant on conjugacy classes or satisfies $w \geq 1$ , $\mathcal {Z}(L^{1}_{w}(G) \otimes ^{\gamma } A) \cong \mathcal {Z}(L^{1}_{w}(G)) \otimes ^{\gamma } \mathcal {Z}(A)$ . As an application, we discuss the conditions under which $\mathcal {Z}(L^{1}_{\omega }(G,A))$ enjoys certain Banach algebraic properties, such as weak amenability or semisimplicity.

In this note, we show that given a closed connected oriented $3$ -manifold M, there exists a knot K in M such that the manifold $M'$ obtained from M by performing an integer surgery admits an open book decomposition which embeds into the trivial open book of the $5$ -sphere $S^5.$