71 research outputs found
Verification of the Firoozbakht conjecture for primes up to four quintillion
If is the k-th prime, the Firoozbakht conjecture states that the
sequence is strictly decreasing. We use the table of
first-occurrence prime gaps in combination with known bounds for the
prime-counting function to verify the Firoozbakht conjecture for primes up to
four quintillion .Comment: 6 pages, 1 tabl
Refined Goldbach conjectures with primes in progressions
We formulate some refinements of Goldbach's conjectures based on heuristic
arguments and numerical data. For instance, any even number greater than 4 is
conjectured to be a sum of two primes with one prime being 3 mod 4. In general,
for fixed and coprime to , any positive even outside of a finite exceptional set is expected to be a sum of two
primes and with , . We make
conjectures about the growth of these exceptional sets.Comment: 10 page
The ternary Goldbach problem
The ternary Goldbach conjecture, or three-primes problem, states that every
odd number greater than can be written as the sum of three primes. The
conjecture, posed in 1742, remained unsolved until now, in spite of great
progress in the twentieth century. In 2013 -- following a line of research
pioneered and developed by Hardy, Littlewood and Vinogradov, among others --
the author proved the conjecture.
In this, as in many other additive problems, what is at issue is really the
proper usage of the limited information we possess on the distribution of prime
numbers. The problem serves as a test and whetting-stone for techniques in
analysis and number theory -- and also as an incentive to think about the
relations between existing techniques with greater clarity.
We will go over the main ideas of the proof. The basic approach is based on
the circle method, the large sieve and exponential sums. For the purposes of
this overview, we will not need to work with explicit constants; however, we
will discuss what makes certain strategies and procedures not just effective,
but efficient, in the sense of leading to good constants. Still, our focus will
be on qualitative improvements.Comment: 29 pages. To be submitted to the Proceedings of the ICM 201
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