# What is known about the largest prime divisor of the product of $k$ consecutive integers?

Take $k$ consecutive composite integers from a prime gap. What is known about the largest prime divisor of their product?

It seems to me that except for the triplet $(8,9,10)$ and the pair $(8,9)$ , this largest prime divisor is always larger than $2k$, but I could not find an elementary (my level) proof.

As $k$ grows it seems that the sharpness of $2k$ as lower bound is lost, therefore I expect that there should exist a more suitable lower bound, from which an "easy" argument for the minoration by $2k$ would follow.

The question is essentially the same as this one from MSE but it did not get any answer. I could only find messy $k$-specific arguments for $k$ up to $4$ which I hope are correct.

• Do you have any reference to a "nonelementary" proof? – Wojowu Oct 31 '15 at 13:09
• @Wojowu. No, but I am not professional mathematician, so my knowledge of (and access to) math literature is very limited. If you know of relevant papers, I 'd be interested. – René Gy Oct 31 '15 at 13:21
• I was asking because when you said "...I could not find an elementary (my level) proof.", I thought you might have found a hard proof and you were just looking for a simpler one. – Wojowu Oct 31 '15 at 13:22
• You might be interested in a paper of Filip Najman at arxiv.org/abs/1108.3710 . The largest prime divisor of the product n+1 to n +f(k) is looked at and shown to be larger than k when n is larger than k. f(k) is pretty small and conjectured to be O(log(k)^2). So you don't need as many as k consecutive integers. Gerhard "Sees This As Smooth Intervals" Paseman, 2015.11.02 – Gerhard Paseman Nov 2 '15 at 18:18
• @Gerhard That is very interesting, thanks. Probably above my current level though. – René Gy Nov 3 '15 at 17:47

it is shown that $$P(n(n+1) \cdots (n+k-1)) > 2k$$ as long as $n > \max\{k+13, \frac{279}{262}k\}$.
Note that for large $k$, the lower bound condition on $n$ is implied by your hypothesis that all of $n, n+1, \dots, n+k-1$ are composite; so this answers your question for large $k$. (And for bounded $k$, it reduces checking your conjecture to a finite computation.)