English

A Sieve for Twin Primes

Number Theory 2019-06-24 v1

Abstract

We present an algorithm analogous to the sieve of Eratosthenes that produces the list of twin primes. Next, we count the number of twin primes resulting from the construction with two different heuristic arguments. The first method is essentially the same as the one in Hardy and Wright. However, the second method is novel. It results in the same asymptotic formula but it uses a simpler correction factor than theirs. Though we have no theory for the accuracy of our estimates, we compute them both without and with the correction factor and they turn out to be close to the actual counts up to 8009.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.09220,
  title  = {A Sieve for Twin Primes},
  author = {Jon S. Birdsey and Geza Schay},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.09220},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

10 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:00:08.349Z