In mathematics, the Hardy–Ramanujan theorem, proved by Hardy & Ramanujan (1917), states that the normal order of the number ω(n) of distinct prime factors of a number n is log(log(n)).
Contents
Roughly speaking, this means that most numbers have about this number of distinct prime factors.
Precise statement
A more precise version states that for any real-valued function ψ(n) that tends to infinity as n tends to infinity
or more traditionally
for almost all (all but an infinitesimal proportion of) integers. That is, let g(x) be the number of positive integers n less than x for which the above inequality fails: then g(x)/x converges to zero as x goes to infinity.
History
A simple proof to the result Turán (1934) was given by Pál Turán, who used the Turán sieve to prove that
Generalizations
The same results are true of Ω(n), the number of prime factors of n counted with multiplicity. This theorem is generalized by the Erdős–Kac theorem, which shows that ω(n) is essentially normally distributed.