We show that $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}(n)$ and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}(n)$, the number of distinct prime factors of $n$ and the number of distinct prime factors of $n$ counted according to multiplicity, are good weighting functions for the pointwise ergodic theorem in $L^{1}$. That is, if $g$ denotes one of these functions and $S_{g,K}=\sum _{n\leq K}g(n)$, then for every ergodic dynamical system $(X,{\mathcal{A}},\unicode[STIX]{x1D707},\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F})$ and every $f\in L^{1}(X)$, $$\begin{eqnarray}\lim _{K\rightarrow \infty }\frac{1}{S_{g,K}}\mathop{\sum }_{n=1}^{K}g(n)f(\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}^{n}x)=\int _{X}f\,d\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}\quad \text{for }\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}\text{ almost every }x\in X.\end{eqnarray}$$ This answers a question raised by Cuny and Weber, who showed this result for $L^{p}$, $p>1$.
Ergodic averages with prime divisor weights in
