Chebyshev's bias and generalized Riemann hypothesis

TL;DR

This paper explores Chebyshev's bias in prime number distributions, reformulates it for general moduli, and proves its equivalence to the generalized Riemann hypothesis, supported by numerical investigations.

Contribution

It generalizes Chebyshev's bias to arbitrary moduli and establishes its equivalence to the generalized Riemann hypothesis, combining theoretical reformulation with numerical analysis.

Findings

Chebyshev's bias relates to GRH for general moduli.

Numerical evidence supports the reformulation.

Proves the equivalence between bias and GRH for the modulus q.

Abstract

It is well known that $li(x)>\pi(x)$ (i) up to the (very large) Skewes' number $x_1 \sim 1.40 \times 10^{316}$ \cite{Bays00}. But, according to a Littlewood's theorem, there exist infinitely many $x$ that violate the inequality, due to the specific distribution of non-trivial zeros $\gamma$ of the Riemann zeta function $\zeta(s)$, encoded by the equation $li(x)-\pi(x)\approx \frac{\sqrt{x}}{\log x}[1+2 \sum_{\gamma}\frac{\sin (\gamma \log x)}{\gamma}]$ (1). If Riemann hypothesis (RH) holds, (i) may be replaced by the equivalent statement $li[\psi(x)]>\pi(x)$ (ii) due to Robin \cite{Robin84}. A statement similar to (i) was found by Chebyshev that $\pi(x;4,3)-\pi(x;4,1)>0$ (iii) holds for any $x<26861$ \cite{Rubin94} (the notation $\pi(x;k,l)$ means the number of primes up to $x$ and congruent to $l\mod k$). The {\it Chebyshev's bias}(iii) is related to the generalized Riemann hypothesis (GRH) and occurs with a logarithmic density $\approx 0.9959$ \cite{Rubin94}. In this paper, we reformulate the Chebyshev's bias for a general modulus $q$ as the inequality $B(x;q,R)-B(x;q,N)>0$ (iv), where $B(x;k,l)=li[\phi(k)*\psi(x;k,l)]-\phi(k)*\pi(x;k,l)$ is a counting function introduced in Robin's paper \cite{Robin84} and $R$ resp. $N$) is a quadratic residue modulo $q$ (resp. a non-quadratic residue). We investigate numerically the case $q=4$ and a few prime moduli $p$. Then, we proove that (iv) is equivalent to GRH for the modulus $q$.