Questions tagged [prime-numbers]
Questions where prime numbers play a key-role, such as: questions on the distribution of prime numbers (twin primes, gaps between primes, Hardy–Littlewood conjectures, etc); questions on prime numbers with special properties (Wieferich prime, Wolstenholme prime, etc.). This tag is often used as a specialized tag in combination with the top-level tag nt.number-theory and (if applicable) analytic-number-theory.
2,216 questions
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Gaussian prime spirals
Imagine a particle in the complex plane, starting at $c_0$, a Gaussian integer,
moving initially $\pm$ in the horizontal
or vertical directions. When it hits a Gaussian prime, it turns left $90^\circ$...
- 153k
123
votes
5
answers
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How did Cole factor $2^{67}-1$ in 1903?
I just heard a This American Life episode which recounted the famous anecdote about Frank Nelson Cole factoring $N:=2^{67}-1$ as $193{,}707{,}721\times 761{,}838{,}257{,}287$. There doesn't seem to be ...
- 161k
103
votes
4
answers
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Philosophy behind Yitang Zhang's work on the Twin Primes Conjecture
Yitang Zhang recently published a new attack on the Twin Primes Conjecture. Quoting Andre Granville :
“The big experts in the field had
already tried to make this approach
work,” Granville said. ...
- 1,063
97
votes
3
answers
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A little number theoretic game
I came up with this little two player game:
The players take turns naming a positive integer. When one player says the number $n$, the other player can only reply in two different ways: They can ...
- 901
84
votes
3
answers
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Czelakowski's claimed proof of the Twin Prime Conjecture
It seems like the article "The Twin Primes Conjecture is True in the Standard Model of Peano Arithmetic: Applications of Rasiowa–Sikorski Lemma in Arithmetic (I)" by Janusz Czelakowski ...
- 1,103
81
votes
6
answers
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Does Zhang's theorem generalize to $3$ or more primes in an interval of fixed length?
Let $p_n$ be the $n$-th prime number, as usual:
$p_1 = 2$, $p_2 = 3$, $p_3 = 5$, $p_4 = 7$, etc.
For $k=1,2,3,\ldots$, define
$$
g_k = \liminf_{n \rightarrow \infty} (p_{n+k} - p_n).
$$
Thus the twin ...
- 81.3k
80
votes
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answer
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The topology of Arithmetic Progressions of primes
The primary motivation for this question is the following: I would like to extract some topological statistics which capture how arithmetic progressions of prime numbers "fit together" in a manner ...
- 15.9k
72
votes
2
answers
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Function that produces primes
For any $n\geq 2$ consider the recursion
\begin{align*}
a(0,n)&=n;\\
a(m,n)&=a(m-1,n)+\operatorname{gcd}(a(m-1,n),n-m),\qquad m\geq 1.
\end{align*}
I conjecture that $a(n-1,n)$ is always ...
user231922
69
votes
4
answers
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Is a "non-analytic" proof of Dirichlet's theorem on primes known or possible?
It is well-known that one can prove certain special cases of Dirichlet's theorem by exhibiting an integer polynomial $p(x)$ with the properties that the prime divisors of $\{ p(n) | n \in \mathbb{Z} \}...
- 124k
69
votes
1
answer
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Iterations of $2^{n-1}+5$: the strong law of small numbers, or something bigger?
I've discovered what I believe is a quite remarkable sequence (A318970), defined by
$$n_1 = 3,\qquad n_{k+1} = 2^{n_k-1}+5\quad(k\geq 1).$$
Here are the first four terms with their prime ...
- 38.4k
68
votes
3
answers
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Chebyshev polynomials of the first kind and primality testing
Can you provide a proof or a counterexample for the claim given below ?
Inspired by Agrawal's conjecture in this paper and by Theorem 4 in this paper I have formulated the following claim :
Let $n$...
- 2,849
67
votes
6
answers
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What is the simplest proof that the density of primes goes to zero?
By density of primes, I mean the proportion of integers between $1$ and $x$ which are prime. The prime number theorem says that this is asymptotically $1/\log(x)$.
I want something much weaker, namely ...
- 4,242
64
votes
1
answer
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Is the Green-Tao theorem true for primes within a given arithmetic progression?
Ben Green and Terrence Tao proved that there are arbitrary length arithmetic progressions among the primes.
Now, consider an arithmetic progression with starting term $a$ and common difference $d$. ...
- 3,897
62
votes
2
answers
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A conjecture regarding prime numbers
For $n,m \geq 3$, define $ P_n = \{ p : p$ is a prime such that $ p\leq n$ and $ p \nmid n \}$ .
For example :
$P_3= \{ 2 \}$
$P_4= \{ 3 \}$
$P_5= \{ 2, 3 \}$,
$P_6= \{ 5 \}$ and so on.
Claim: $...
- 653
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votes
6
answers
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Has decidability got something to do with primes?
Note: I have modified the question to make it clearer and more relevant. That makes some of references to the old version no longer hold. I hope the victims won't be furious over this.
Motivation:
...
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