Why should one expect to find long runs of (non)-Ramanjuan primes ?
Report, 2012

Sondow et al have studied Ramanujan primes (RPs) and observed numerically that, while half of all primes are RPs asymptotically, one obtains runs of consecutives RPs (resp. non-RPs) which are statistically significantly longer than one would expect if one was tossing an unbiased coin. In this discussion paper we attempt a heuristic explanation of this phenomenon. Our heuristic follows naturally from the Prime Number Theorem, but seems to be only partly satisfactory. It motivates why one should obtain long runs of both RPs and non-RPs, and also longer runs of non-RPs than of RPs. However, it also suggests that one should obtain longer runs of RPs than have so far been observed in the data, and this issue remains puzzling. NOTE: This is purely a discussion paper, I do not intend to submit it to a journal. I was asked by various people to publicise it, in order to hopefully stimulate some further investigation of Ramanujan primes

Author

Peter Hegarty

Chalmers, Mathematical Sciences, Mathematics

University of Gothenburg

Roots

Basic sciences

Subject Categories

Probability Theory and Statistics

Discrete Mathematics

More information

Created

10/6/2017