In number theory, the Erdős–Kac theorem, named after Paul Erdős and Mark Kac, and also known as the fundamental theorem of probabilistic number theory, states that if ω(n) is the number of distinct prime factors of n, then, loosely speaking, the probability distribution of
is the standard normal distribution. This is an extension of the Hardy–Ramanujan theorem, which states that the normal order of ω(n) is log log n with a typical error of size .
For any fixed a < b,
where is the normal (or "Gaussian") distribution, defined as
More generally, if f(n) is a strongly additive function () with for all prime p, then