Number of irreducible polynomials and pairs of relatively prime polynomials in several variables over finite fields

We discuss several enumerative results for irreducible polynomials of a given degree and pairs of relatively prime polynomials of given degrees in several variables over finite fields. Two notions of degree, the total degree and the vector degree, are considered. We show that the number of irreducibles call be computed recursively by degree and that the number of relatively prime pairs can be expressed in terms of the number of irreducibles. We also obtain asymptotic formulas for the number of irreducibles and the number of relatively prime pairs. The asymptotic formulas for the number of irreducibles generalize and improve several previous results by Carlitz, Cohen and Bodin. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.