On the divisibility of class numbers and discriminants of imaginary quadratic fields

Abstract

Let $n$ be a squarefree positive odd integer. We will show that there exist infinitely many imaginary quadratic number fields with discriminant divisible by $n$ and-at the same time-having an element of order $n$ in the class group. We then apply our result to prove that for a given squarefree positive odd integer $n$ there exist infinitely many $N$ such that $n$ divides both $N$ and $r(N)$, where $r(N)$ is the representation number of $N$ as sums of three squares.