Chebyshev's bias for composite numbers with restricted prime divisors

• Authors: Pieter Moree
• Venue: Mathematics of Computation
• Year: 2004

Let π(x;d,a) denote the number of primes p ≤ x with p ≡ a(modd). Chebyshev's bias is the phenomenon for which "more often" π(x; d, n) π(x; d, r), than the other way around, where n is a quadratic nonresidue mod d and r is a quadratic residue mod d. If π(x; d, n) ≥ π(x; d, r) for every x up to some large number, then one expects that N(x; d, n) ≥ N(x; d, r) for every x. Here N(x; d, a) denotes the number of integers n ≤ x such that every prime divisor p of n satisfies p ≡ a(mod d). In this paper we develop some tools to deal with this type of problem and apply them to show that, for example, N(x; 4, 3) ≥ N(x; 4, 1) for every x.In the process we express the so-called second order Landau-Ramanujan constant as an infinite series and show that the same type of formula holds for a much larger class of constants.