ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

General Dirichlet series

Imagine you have a very big bag of candy. Now, let's say you want to organize these candies in different flavors, like strawberry, blueberry, and chocolate. That's kind of like what a general Dirichlet series does - it helps us organize a bunch of numbers by putting them into different groups based on their properties.

The first thing we need to know is that each number can be expressed as a product of prime numbers. For example, 12 can be expressed as 2*2*3. Now, let's say we want to group all the numbers that have a factor of 2 in them together, and all the numbers that have a factor of 3 in them together, and so on.

To do this, we write out a formula that looks like this:

f(s) = sum (n=1 to infinity) of a(n) / n^s,

where s is a complex number, and a(n) is the number of ways we can express n as a product of primes. This formula is called a Dirichlet series.

Using this formula, we can group together all the numbers that have a factor of 2 by setting s equal to the complex number that corresponds to 2. Similarly, we can group together all the numbers that have a factor of 3 by setting s equal to the complex number that corresponds to 3.

By doing this for each prime number, we can create a general Dirichlet series that groups all the numbers into different categories based on their prime factors. This can be really helpful for understanding the properties of the numbers we're working with, and for finding patterns in large sets of data.

So just like organizing a bag of candy by flavor, a general Dirichlet series helps us organize numbers into different groups based on their properties, making it easier to understand and analyze large sets of data.