This paper gives a new and direct construction of the multi-prime big de Rham–Witt complex, which is defined for every commutative and unital ring; the original construction by Madsen and myself relied on the adjoint functor theorem and accordingly was very indirect. The construction given here also corrects the 2-torsion which was not quite correct in the original version. The new construction is based on the theory of modules and derivations over a$λ$-ring which is developed first. The main result in this first part of the paper is that the universal derivation of a$λ$-ring is given by the universal derivation of the underlying ring together with an additional structure depending directly on the$λ$-ring structure in question. In the case of the ring of big Witt vectors, this additional structure gives rise to divided Frobenius operators on the module of Kähler differentials. It is the existence of these divided Frobenius operators that makes the new construction of the big de Rham–Witt complex possible. It is further shown that the big de Rham–Witt complex behaves well with respect to étale maps, and finally, the big de Rham–Witt complex of the ring of integers is explicitly evaluated.

We enhance the efficient congruencing method for estimating Vinogradov’s integral for moments of order 2$s$, with $${1\leqslant s\leqslant k^{2}-1}$$ . In this way, we prove the main conjecture for such even moments when $${1\leqslant s\leqslant \tfrac{1}{4}(k+1)^{2}}$$ , showing that the moments exhibit strongly diagonal behaviour in this range. There are improvements also for larger values of$s$, these finding application to the asymptotic formula in Waring’s problem.

Let $${f \in \mathbb{Z}[x]}$$ , $${\deg f =3}$$ . Assume that$f$does not have repeated roots. Assume as well that, for every prime$q$, $${f(x)\not\equiv 0}$$ mod$q$^{2}has at least one solution in $${(\mathbb{Z}/q^2 \mathbb{Z})^*}$$ . Then, under these two necessary conditions, there are infinitely many primes$p$such that$f$($p$) is square-free.

For any natural number$m$(>1) let$P$($m$) denote the greatest prime divisor of$m$. By the problem of Erdős in the title of the present paper we mean the general version of his problem, that is, his conjecture from 1965 that $$\frac{P(2^n-1)}{n} \to \infty \quad {\rm as}\, n \to \infty$$ (see Erdős [10]) and its far-reaching generalization to Lucas and Lehmer numbers. In the present paper the author delivers three refinements upon Yu [40] required by C. L. Stewart for solving completely the problem of Erdős (see Stewart [25]). The author gives also some remarks on the solution of this problem, aiming to be more streamlined with respect to the$p$-adic theory of logarithmic forms.

Let$u$_{$n$}be the$n$th term of a Lucas sequence or a Lehmer sequence. In this article we shall establish an estimate from below for the greatest prime factor of$u$_{$n$}which is of the form$n$exp(log$n$/104 log log$n$). In doing so, we are able to resolve a question of Schinzel from 1962 and a conjecture of Erdős from 1965. In addition we are able to give the first general improvement on results of Bang from 1886 and Carmichael from 1912.