The direct divisor summatory function formula evaluates floor divisions. Its balanced Dirichlet hyperbola method formula evaluates floor divisions and reuses their sum for the other strip, followed by doubling and square-overlap subtraction. Thus it uses arithmetic operations, with big O notation, in a model that counts each division, addition and multiplication as one operation. At , the division counts for these two formulas are and .
Figure 1.
The balanced Dirichlet hyperbola method reduces floor divisions from to ; for , two sequences of partial sums reach the same exact answer 35
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For a general Dirichlet convolution, the asymmetric formula has outer terms; evaluating and has an additional cost. Under , equal thresholds minimize , but an asymmetric split can be useful if the two partial sums have different evaluation costs. The balanced divisor summatory function gains the further reuse because its two arithmetic functions are identical.
These are arithmetic operation counts, rather than counts of elementary operations on binary digits: the integers grow with , and division of longer integers costs more in that model of computational complexity theory. Computing also requires an exact integer square root, or checking and correcting a numerical square root until holds.
Computer science Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-13
Computer science studies how information can be represented and transformed by algorithms, and what those transformations can achieve. Its central questions connect mathematics to practical design: what answer should a procedure produce, why is it correct, and how much work does it require as its input grows? Computability theory asks which tasks can be solved at all; computational complexity theory asks what resources a solution needs.
The beauty is that choosing a representation can change what is feasible. Finding a name among a million entries sounds like a million checks. Store the entries in a sorted array, and binary search needs at most twenty middle-entry comparisons. The order makes each unsuccessful comparison eliminate a whole region of possibilities. A data structure supplies useful organization; an algorithm exploits it; time complexity explains the resulting savings.
Algorithm correctness covers every permitted input, including absent names and empty collections. Time complexity predicts scaling; statistical program profiling investigates a particular implementation.
For the active set , maintain
The initial matrix inverse costs . At step , compute in operations and all active ridge coefficients in operations; their smallest absolute value determines .
After deleting ,
Part b ensures that the denominator in the Sherman–Morrison formula is positive, and the rank-one downdate
costs . Summing over the steps gives
Since , both earlier terms are bounded by , proving the claimed computational complexity within computational complexity theory.
Permanent (mathematics) 2026-10-14
The permanent of a matrix adds the products obtained by choosing one entry in each row and one in each column. For an matrix with entries in the real numbers or complex numbers,
Here each permutation chooses column in row , and the symmetric group lists every such bijection. The formula resembles the Leibniz formula for determinants, but omits the sign of a permutation. For a two-by-two matrix,
The absence of alternating signs makes the permanent of a matrix particularly useful for counting allowed assignments.
For a zero-one matrix, let rows represent people, columns represent jobs, and mean that person can do job . This is the biadjacency matrix of a bipartite graph. A product in the permanent is one exactly when all the selected assignments are allowed; otherwise it is zero. Each surviving permutation assigns every person a different job, which is a perfect matching. Thus the permanent counts perfect matchings. This interpretation and the definition are given in Yufei Zhao, Probabilistic Methods in Combinatorics, §10.2, pp. 178–179.
For a fully enumerated example, take
Among the six permutations of three columns, exactly three give nonzero products: , and . These tuples list the chosen column in each successive row. Each product is one, so . Their permutation signs are , giving . The diagram displays all three allowed assignments.
Figure 1.
Three allowed one-to-one assignments contribute positively to the permanent, while their permutation signs give a determinant of minus one
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A zero determinant need not mean that no assignment exists. The two-by-two all-ones matrix has permanent and determinant : its two assignments cancel in the determinant. The nonzero determinant criterion for a perfect matching is sufficient for existence, but the converse fails for a fixed zero-one matrix.
For nonnegative entries, the permanent instead sums assignment weights, with each assignment weighted by the product of its selected entries. It is then a total weight rather than necessarily an integer count. With arbitrary entries in the real numbers or complex numbers, even the permanent can have cancellation; the counting interpretation specifically uses zero-one entries. The permanent as probability of distinct independent choices gives another useful nonnegative interpretation.
There are terms in the defining sum, linking direct evaluation to the factorial. For the all-ones matrix, every term is one and the permanent is exactly ; the identity matrix has permanent one. Finding one allowed assignment and counting all allowed assignments are different questions. Their relationship to computational complexity theory was studied in L. G. Valiant, The complexity of computing the permanent, Theoretical Computer Science 8(2), 189–201, 1979. The elementary sum is useful for small examples, while the existing dense permanent approximation describes a more specialized way of estimating large counts.