English

All the information in the integers is in the primes

General Mathematics 2025-05-13 v3

Abstract

Building upon the work of Chebyshev, Shannon and Kontoyiannis, it may be demonstrated that Chebyshev's asymptotic result: \begin{equation} \ln N \sim \sum_{p \leq N} \frac{1}{p} \cdot \ln p \end{equation} has a natural information-theoretic interpretation as the information-content of a typical integer ZU([1,N])Z \sim U([1,N]), sampled under the maximum entropy distribution, is asymptotically equivalent to the information content of all primes pNp \leq N weighted by their typical frequency. This result is established by showing that the correct information-theoretic interpretation of the entropy lnp\ln p may be deduced from the author's recent observation that the prime numbers have a uniform source distribution. Moreover, using Chaitin's theorem that almost all integers are algorithmically random we may extend this asymptotic result to the setting of algorithmic information theory and derive an upper-bound on the algorithmic information of a typical integer.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2112.08911,
  title  = {All the information in the integers is in the primes},
  author = {Aidan Rocke},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.08911},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

The correct proof of Chebyshev's theorem is in: arXiv:2308.10817