Polignac's conjecture
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In number theory, Polignac's conjecture was made by Alphonse de Polignac in 1849 and states:
- For any positive even number n, there are infinitely many prime gaps of size n. In other words: There are infinitely many cases of two consecutive prime numbers with difference n.
The conjecture has not been proven or disproven for any value of n.
For n = 2, it is the twin prime conjecture. For n = 4, it says there are infinitely many cousin primes (p, p+4). For n = 6, it says there are infinitely many sexy primes (p, p+6) with no prime between p and p+6.
The first Hardy-Littlewood conjecture generalizes Polignac's conjecture to cover all prime constellations, and giving conjectured asymptotic densities.
[edit] Conjectured density
Let πn(x) for even n be the number of prime gaps of size n below x.
The first Hardy-Littlewood conjecture says the asymptotic density is of form
where Cn is a function of n, and means that the quotient of two expressions tends to 1 as x approaches infinity.
C2 is the twin prime constant
where the product extends over all prime numbers p ≥ 3.
Cn is C2 multiplied by a number which depends on the odd prime factors q of n:
For example, C4 = C2 and C6 = 2C2. Twin primes have the same conjectured density as cousin primes, and half that of sexy primes.
Note that each odd prime factor q of n increases the conjectured density compared to twin primes by a factor of . A heuristic argument follows. It relies on some unproven assumptions so the conclusion remains a conjecture. The chance of a random odd prime q dividing either a or a + 2 in a random "potential" twin prime pair is , since q divides 1 of the q numbers from a to a + q − 1. Now assume q divides n and consider a potential prime pair (a, a + n). q divides a + n if and only if q divides a, and the chance of that is . The chance of (a, a + n) being free from the factor q, divided by the chance that (a, a + 2) is free from q, then becomes divided by . This equals which transfers to the conjectured prime density. In the case of n = 6, the argument simplifies to: If a is a random number then 3 has chance 2/3 of dividing a or a + 2, but only chance 1/3 of dividing a and a + 6, so the latter pair is conjectured twice as likely to both be prime.
[edit] References
- Alphonse de Polignac, Recherches nouvelles sur les nombres premiers. Comptes Rendus des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences (1849)
- Eric W. Weisstein, de Polignac's Conjecture at MathWorld.
- Eric W. Weisstein, k-Tuple Conjecture at MathWorld.