English

Fibonacci primes, primes of the form $2^n-k$ and beyond

Number Theory 2024-09-10 v3

Abstract

We speculate on the distribution of primes in exponentially growing, linear recurrence sequences (un)n0(u_n)_{n\geq 0} in the integers. By tweaking a heuristic which is successfully used to predict the number of prime values of polynomials, we guess that either there are only finitely many primes unu_n, or else there exists a constant cu>0c_u>0 (which we can give good approximations to) such that there are culogN\sim c_u \log N primes unu_n with nNn\leq N, as NN\to \infty. We compare our conjecture to the limited amount of data that we can compile.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2307.07894,
  title  = {Fibonacci primes, primes of the form $2^n-k$ and beyond},
  author = {Jon Grantham and Andrew Granville},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.07894},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

v3: minor changes to align with the published version v2: replace earlier draft inadvertently submitted as v1