Representations of positive integers as sums of arithmetic progressions, I

Abstract

This is the first part of a two-part paper. Our paper was motivated by two classical papers: A paper of Sir Charles Wheatstone published in 1844 on representing certain powers of an integer as sums of arithmetic progressions and a paper of J. J. Sylvester published in 1882 for determining the number of ways a positive integer can be represented as the sum of a sequence of consecutive integers. There have been many attempts to extend Sylvester Theorem to the number of representations for an integer as the sums of different types of sequences, including sums of certain arithmetic progressions. In this part of the paper, we will make yet one more extension: We will describe a procedure for computing the number of ways a positive integer can be represented as the sums of all possible arithmetic progressions, together with an example to illustrate how this procedure can be carried out. In the process of doing this, we will also give an extension of Wheatstone’s work. In the second part of the paper, we will continue on the problems initiated by Wheatstone by studying certain relationships among the representations for different powers of an integer as sums of arithmetic progressions.