ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Dirichlet convolution

Imagine you have two boxes of marbles, one with red marbles and the other with blue marbles. You want to know how many different ways you can pick one marble from the red box and one marble from the blue box.


To figure this out, you can pour out all the marbles from each box and line them up in a grid, with the red marbles along the top and the blue marbles down the side. Each square in the grid represents one possible combination of one red marble and one blue marble.


Now, let's say you want to know how many ways you can pick two marbles from the red box and one marble from the blue box. To figure this out, you can create a new grid with two rows of red marbles and one row of blue marbles. Each combination of two red and one blue marble corresponds to a square in the grid.


Dirichlet convolution is a mathematical tool that allows you to combine two sets of numbers in a similar way. Instead of marbles, we're working with sequences of numbers. Given two sequences of numbers, we can use Dirichlet convolution to find a new sequence that tells us something about the relationship between the original two sequences.


The formula for Dirichlet convolution involves multiplying corresponding terms from each sequence and summing up these products over divisors of a given number. In simple terms, we're taking certain combinations of numbers from each sequence and adding them together in a specific way.


For example, let's say we have two sequences of numbers: A = {1, 2, 3, 4} and B = {5, 6, 7, 8}. To find the Dirichlet convolution of these sequences with respect to the number 12, we need to consider all the divisors of 12: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12.


For each divisor d, we multiply the terms in A and B whose indices are also divisors of d, and add these products together. So, when d = 1, we multiply 1 and 5 (the terms with indices 1 and 1) to get 5, and do the same for the other terms. We then add these products together to get the first term of the new sequence: 5 + 12 + 21 + 32 = 70.


We repeat this process for each divisor of 12, and end up with a new sequence C = {70, 46, 49, 56}. This sequence tells us something about the relationship between A and B with respect to the number 12.


Dirichlet convolution may seem complicated at first, but it's a powerful tool for understanding number theory and many other areas of mathematics.
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