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March 31, 20260 citationsOpen Access

The Arithmetic of Digit Polygons: Spectral Orthogonality, Carry Defects, and the Geometry of Reciprocal Prime Addition

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KFKevin Fathi

Key Points

  • The research aims to explore the geometric properties of digit polygons formed from the addition of reciprocal primes.
  • Analyzed the signed area of digit polygons using a three-layer decomposition.
  • Investigated the conditions under which carry terms vanish based on the multiplicative orders of the primes.
  • Explored the carry defect as a quadratic function of the carry vector.
  • Applied the universal attractor theorem to the cumulative sum of reciprocal primes.
  • The digit polygons of coprime-period primes are geometrically non-interacting under addition.
  • The carry defect is positive for large coprime-period pairs, indicating a smoothing effect on the polygon.
  • The area of the normalized cumulative sum converges to −33/8 regardless of the prime selection.
  • Integer crossings produce transient degeneracies that resolve with additional primes as equidistribution is restored.

Abstract

This paper studies the geometry of adding reciprocal primes through the lens of their digit polygons. For primes p and q coprime to the base, the decimal addition 1/p + 1/q = (p+q) / (pq) produces a digit polygon whose signed area is analyzed via an exact three-layer decomposition. The area addition law decomposes the carry-free (pointwise) sum's area into individual areas plus a cross-term equal to the polarization of the shoelace quadratic form. The spectral orthogonality theorem establishes that this cross-area vanishes if and only if the multiplicative orders of the base mod p and mod q have gcd at most 2, so digit polygons of coprime-period primes are geometrically non-interacting under addition; when the periods share a larger common factor the cross-area is controlled by Gauss sum estimates. The carry defect — the difference between the actual area and the carry-free area — is proved to be expressible as an exact quadratic function of the carry vector and is shown to be positive (area-reducing) for coprime-period pairs with sufficiently large primes, meaning carries smooth the polygon toward its centroid. Applied iteratively to the cumulative sum SN = Σ 1/pᵢ, the universal attractor theorem proves that the normalized area A (SN) /k (SN) converges to −33/8 regardless of which primes are summed, with super-exponentially growing period and diverging total area. The Mertens polygon correspondence translates Mertens' theorem on the sum of reciprocal primes into a geometric statement: integer crossings of SN produce transient polygon degeneracies that resolve within O (1) additional primes as equidistribution reasserts itself.

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Cite This Study

Kevin Fathi (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/69cb6526e6a8c024954b92f0https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19315083
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