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I've been trying without success to find the paper

Dickman, Karl, "On the frequency of numbers containing prime factors of a certain relative magnitude." Ark Mal., Astronomi och Physik, 22A (10), 1930. I checked at Rice U. and it was not available.

Actually,I would be satisfied with an exposition of the information it contains, in some notes or another paper. This is not extremely important, I'm just curious to learn how the Dickman function is derived.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks, Tom

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    $\begingroup$ How about the following paper of A. Granville, "Smooth numbers: computational number theory and beyond" ? Link: dms.umontreal.ca/~andrew/PDF/msrire.pdf $\endgroup$
    – Timothy Foo
    Commented Feb 24, 2012 at 4:07
  • $\begingroup$ emis.de/cgi-bin/jfmen/MATH/JFM/… $\endgroup$
    – Franz Lemmermeyer
    Commented Feb 24, 2012 at 6:51
  • $\begingroup$ This paper by Hildebrand and Tenenbaum is a survey on this problem: "Integers without large prime factors." J. Théor. Nombres Bordeaux 5 (1993), no. 2, 411–484. $\endgroup$
    – Dimitris Koukoulopoulos
    Commented Mar 9, 2012 at 20:32
  • $\begingroup$ @FranzLemmermeyer FWIW: That link misspells Karl's surname: It appears there as "Dickmann" when, in fact, there should be only one n. I happen to be sensitive to this particular spelling! $\endgroup$
    – Benjamin Dickman
    Commented Mar 24, 2021 at 4:16

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Answering from the far future! I present some literature on this topic:

1) K. Dickman in his original paper of 1930 gave an heuristic argument that can be found in pages 382-383 of The art of computer programming, volume 2 (third edition) by Knuth.

2) V. Ramaswami made the argument rigorous in his 1949 paper On the number of positive integers less than $x$ and free of prime divisors greater than $x^c$.

See also the review MR0031958 for links to "weaker" papers (according to the reviewer) of Chowla and Vijayaraghavan and of Buhštab published around the same time, plus further work of Ramaswami on the question.

3) The second part of the AMS memoir Numbers with small prime factors, and the least $k$th power non-residue by K.K. Norton (1971) surveys Dickman's function.

4) As already mentioned by Dimitris Koukoulopoulos, the paper Integers without large prime factors by Hildebrand and Tenenbaum (1993) is a survey which actualizes that of Norton.

5) Integers without large prime factors: from Ramanujan to de Brujin by P. Moree (2014) is a small recent survey highlighting the contributions of de Brujin to the question.

6) The very recent paper Exact asymptotics of positive solutions to Dickman equation by Diblík and Medina (2018) improves the well-known asymptotic formulas for Dickman's function.

7) Also very recent are tight estimates for effective counts of smooth numbers due to Lichtman and Pomerance (2018), published in Explicit estimates for the distribution of numbers free of large prime factors.

8) A modern textbook reference for Dickman's function theorem is Theorem 7.2 of Multiplicative number theory I: classical theory (2006) by Montgomery and Vaughan.

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    $\begingroup$ Thank you for your very thorough answer! It's not too late, this is a long-term interest of mine. Tom $\endgroup$
    – Tom Dickens
    Commented Mar 18, 2018 at 17:49

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