Skip to main content

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

5
  • 8
    $\begingroup$ So the point is that any problem like this must be compared to $\log \log N$. But to get any good estimates of the comparison is extremely hard, because $\log\log N$ is so much smaller than $\infty$. For example, in the problem above, based on $N = 10^9$, we could argue that in fact primes very much do like to divide the sum of their predecessors, as there are in fact 5 primes with this property, which is fifty percent more than the expected number. $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 1, 2013 at 20:18
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ Why is the probability $1/p$? $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 2, 2013 at 0:52
  • 14
    $\begingroup$ @Filippo Alberto Edoardo: It is a heuristic (as said in the answer) but one that in this cases seems to make perfect sense: the sum of the primes preceeding $p$ is a number significantly larger than $p$ (about size $p^2/ (2 \log p)$ , I think) and there seems no reason for it being biased towards being in any particular residue class moduo $p$; so that it is $0$ mod $p$ seems just as likely as it being anything else, so prop. $1/p$ for it being $0$, ie divisible by $p$. This is the natural heuristic in this case, and explains the scarcity. To make this heuristic precise, seems very hard. $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 2, 2013 at 12:48
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ Thanks, I did not intepret the $1/p$ as being the sentence "lie in one of the $p$ classes $\mod{p}$". $\endgroup$ Commented Jan 22, 2014 at 23:53
  • 8
    $\begingroup$ (Nitpicking: The guy's name was Mertens, not Merten.) $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 19, 2014 at 11:25