The Universe of Disco

Consecutive squareful numbers

On Saturday I was thinking about how each of !!48, 49, 50!! is a multiple of a square number, and similarly !!98, 99, 100!!. No such sequence of four numbers came immediately to mind. The smallest example turns out to be !!242, 243, 244, 245!!.

Let's say a number is “squareful” if it has the form $$a\cdot b^2$$ for !!b>1!!. The opposite, “squarefree”, is a standard term, but “non-squarefree” sounds even worse than “squareful”. Do ten consecutive squareful numbers exist, and if so, how can we find them?

I did a little algebraic tinkering but didn't come up with anything. If !!n,n+1, n+2!! are consecutive squareful numbers, then so are !!2n, 2n+2, 2n+4!!, except they aren't consecutive, but maybe we could find the right !!n!! so that !!2n+1!! and !!2n+3!! are also squareful. I couldn't make this work though, so I wrote some brute-force search programs to get the lay of the land.

The computer quickly produced sequences of length 7:

$$\begin{array}{rcrr} 217070 & = & 4430 \ · & 7^2 \\ 217071 & = & 24119 \ · & 3^2 \\ 217072 & = & 54268 \ · & 2^2 \\ 217073 & = & 17 \ · & 113^2 \\ 217074 & = & 1794 \ · & 11^2 \\ 217075 & = & 8683 \ · & 5^2 \\ 217076 & = & 54269 \ · & 2^2 \end{array} $$

and length 8:

$$\begin{array}{rcrr} 1092747 & = & 3027 \ · & 19^2 \\ 1092748 & = & 273187 \ · & 2^2 \\ 1092749 & = & 22301 \ · & 7^2 \\ 1092750 & = & 43710 \ · & 5^2 \\ 1092751 & = & 9031 \ · & 11^2 \\ 1092752 & = & 273188 \ · & 2^2 \\ 1092753 & = & 121417 \ · & 3^2 \\ 1092754 & = & 6466 \ · & 13^2 \\ \end{array} $$

Neither of these suggested anything to me, and nor did any of the other outputs, so I stuck !!1092747!! into OEIS. With numbers like that you don't even have to ask for the whole sequence, you only need to ask for the one number. Six sequences came up but the first five are all the same and were what I was looking for: A045882: Smallest term of first run of (at least) n consecutive integers which are not squarefree.

This led me to Louis Marmet's paper First occurrences of square-free gaps and an algorithm for their computation. The paper provides the earliest sequences of !!k!! consecutive squareful numbers, for !!k≤ 18!!, and bounds for how far out these sequences must be when !!k≤24!!. This is enough to answer the questions I originally asked:

• Are there ten consecutive squareful numbers? Yes, the smallest example starts at !!262\,315\,467!!, found in 1999 by D. Bernier.

• How can we find them? Marmet gives a sieve method that starts simple and becomes increasingly elaborate.

The paper is from 2007, so it seems plausible that the same algorithms on 2021 computers could produce some previously unknown results.

[ Addendum 20211124: The original version of this article ended “The general problem, of whether there are arbitrarily long sequences of squareful numbers, seems to be open.” This is completely wrong. Daniel Wagner and Shreevatsa R. pointed out that the existence of arbitrarily long sequences is quite elementary. Pick any squares you like that do not share a common factor, say for example !!49, 9, 4,!! and !!25!!. Now (because Chinese remainder theorem) you can find consecutive numbers that are multiples of those specific squares; in this case !!28322, 28323, 28324, 28325!!. ]

[ In only vaguely related news, I was driving Toph to school this morning, and a car in front of mine had license plate number !!5625 = 75^2!!. ]

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