We develop a generalisation of the square sieve of Heath-Brown and use it to give an alternate proof of one of the large sieve inequalities in our previous paper [‘A large sieve inequality for characters to quadratic moduli’, Preprint, https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~ccorrigan/preprint6.pdf].

Let f(x) and g(x) be polynomials in $\mathbb F_{2}[x]$ with ${\rm deg}\text{ } f=n$. It is shown that for $n\gg 1$, there is an $g_{1}(x)\in \mathbb F_{2}[x]$ with ${\rm deg}\text{ } g_{1}\leqslant \max\{{\rm deg}\text{ } g, 6.7\log n\}$ and $g(x)-g_{1}(x)$ having $ \lt 6.7\log n$ terms such that $\gcd(f(x), g_{1}(x))=1$. As an application, it is established using a result of Dubickas and Sha that given $f(x)\in \mathbb F_{2}[x]$ of degree $n\geqslant 1$, there is a separable $g(x)\in 2[x]$ with ${\rm deg}\text{ } g= {\rm deg}\text{ } f$ and satisfying that $f(x)-g(x)$ has $\leqslant 6.7\log n$ terms. As a simple consequence, the latter result holds in $\mathbb Z[x]$ after replacing ‘number of terms’ by the L1-norm of a polynomial and $6.7\log n$ by $6.8\log n$. This improves the bound $(\log n)^{\log 4 +\operatorname{\varepsilon}}$ obtained by Filaseta and Moy.

We use the Weyl bound for Dirichlet L-functions to derive zero-density estimates for L-functions associated to families of fixed-order Dirichlet characters. The results improve on previous bounds given by the author when $\sigma $ is sufficiently distant from the critical line.

We prove some zero density theorems for certain families of Dirichlet L-functions. More specifically, the subjects of our interest are the collections of Dirichlet L-functions associated with characters to moduli from certain sparse sets and of certain fixed orders.

Let $K=\mathbb{Q}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D714})$ with $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}$ the root of a degree $n$ monic irreducible polynomial $f\in \mathbb{Z}[X]$. We show that the degree $n$ polynomial $N(\sum _{i=1}^{n-k}x_{i}\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}^{i-1})$ in $n-k$ variables takes the expected asymptotic number of prime values if $n\geqslant 4k$. In the special case $K=\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt[n]{\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}})$, we show that $N(\sum _{i=1}^{n-k}x_{i}\sqrt[n]{\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}^{i-1}})$ takes infinitely many prime values, provided $n\geqslant 22k/7$.

Our proof relies on using suitable ‘Type I’ and ‘Type II’ estimates in Harman’s sieve, which are established in a similar overall manner to the previous work of Friedlander and Iwaniec on prime values of $X^{2}+Y^{4}$ and of Heath-Brown on $X^{3}+2Y^{3}$. Our proof ultimately relies on employing explicit elementary estimates from the geometry of numbers and algebraic geometry to control the number of highly skewed lattices appearing in our final estimates.

We construct a shifted version of the Turán sieve method developed by R. Murty and the second author and apply it to counting problems on tournaments. More precisely, we obtain upper bounds for the number of tournaments which contain a fixed number of restricted $r$-cycles. These are the first concrete results which count the number of cycles over “all tournaments”.

Let $k\geq 2$ and $\Pi (n)= { \mathop{\prod }\nolimits}_{i= 1}^{k} ({a}_{i} n+ {b}_{i} )$ for some integers ${a}_{i} , {b}_{i} $ ($1\leq i\leq k$). Suppose that $\Pi (n)$ has no fixed prime divisors. Weighted sieves have shown for infinitely many integers $n$ that the number of prime factors $\Omega (\Pi (n))$ of $\Pi (n)$ is at most ${r}_{k} $, for some integer ${r}_{k} $ depending only on $k$. We use a new kind of weighted sieve to improve the possible values of ${r}_{k} $ when $k\geq 4$.

We consider logarithmic averages, over friable integers, of non-negative multiplicative functions. Under logarithmic, one-sided or two-sided hypotheses, we obtain sharp estimates that improve upon known results in the literature regarding both the quality of the error term and the range of validity. The one-sided hypotheses correspond to classical sieve assumptions. They are applied to provide an effective form of the Johnsen–Selberg prime power sieve.

Let $f\in \mathbb{Z}[ x,y]$ be a reducible homogeneous polynomial of degree 3. We show that $f(x,y)$ has an even number of prime factors as often as an odd number of prime factors.

This is an expanded version of two lectures given at the conference held at Sydney University in December 1997 on the 50th anniversary of the death of G. H. Hardy.

A sieve lemma is found, applicable to certain families of analytic functions on the unit disk, analogous to a large sieve lemma of P. X. Gallagher for sets of integers.

Let h: [0,1] → R be such that and define .In 1966, Erdős [8] proved that holds for almost all n, which by using a simple argument implies that in the case h(u) = u, for almost all n, He further obtained that, for every z > 0 and almost all n, and that where ϕ, ψ, are continuous distribution functions. Several other results concerning the normal growth of prime factors of integers were obtained by Galambos [10], [11] and by De Koninck and Galambos [6].

Let χ = ﹛xm : w ∈ N﹜ be a sequence of real numbers such that limm→∞ xm = +∞. For each x ∈ χ let be a set of primes p ≤x. Denote by p(n) the smallest prime factor of n. In this paper, we investigate the number of prime divisors p of n, belonging to for which Th(n,p) > z. Given Δ < 1, we study the behaviour of the function We also investigate the two functions , where, in each case, h belongs to a large class of functions.