Take to contain the primes at least ; the exceptional local behavior at and is then harmless. Fix a sufficiently large constant and later choose
with fixed small . The Buchstab identity gives
The first term is for a positive constant , by direct counting in the finitely many permitted residue classes modulo .
For each term in the sum, part c supplies the local factor and remainders bounded by powers of . Apply the Selberg upper-bound sieve to the remaining prime conditions. Mertens theorem gives the dimension-three density
so the main terms in the Buchstab sum are bounded by
This convergent tail can be made smaller than by taking large. The weighted remainder terms are : the estimate controls the summed remainders, while part d controls uniformly the loss caused by the finite sieve level. Choosing sufficiently small relative to , and then taking large, therefore gives
for some absolute .
For every counted , the distinct prime divisors of are either below the fixed or at least . The first class contains at most primes, while makes the second class contain at most
primes. Since every prime divisor of , , or divides ,
after enlarging an absolute constant . A positive proportion occurs for arbitrarily large , so infinitely many such exist. This is the almost-primes from an upper-bound sieve and Buchstab identity method.