Vivian Kuperberg

Vivian Kuperberg, Université de Tel-Aviv, Israël


Odd moments in the distribution of primes

In 2004, Montgomery and Soundararajan showed (conditionally) that the distribution of the number of primes
in appropriately sized intervals is approximately Gaussian and has a somewhat smaller variance than you might
expect from modeling the primes as a purely random sequence. Their work depends on evaluating sums of certain
arithmetic constants that generalize the twin prime constant, known as singular series. In particular, these sums
exhibit square-root cancellation in each term if they have an even number of terms, but if they have an odd number
of terms, there should be slightly more than square-root cancellation. I will discuss sums of singular series with
an odd number of terms, including tighter bounds for small cases and the function field analog. I will also explain
how this problem is connected to a simple problem about adding fractions.