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On a Stricter Twin Primes Conjecture, and on the Polignac's Conjecture in general

General Mathematics 2023-03-13 v2

Abstract

The Polignac's Conjecture, first formulated by Alphonse de Polignac in 1849, asserts that, for any even number M, there exist infinitely many couples of prime numbers P, P+M. When M = 2, this reduces to the Twin Primes Conjecture. Despite numerical evidence, and many theoretical progresses, the conjecture has resisted a formal proof since. In the first part of this paper, we investigate a stricter version of the conjecture, expressed as follows: ''Let pnp_{n} be the n-th prime. Then, there always exist twin primes between (pn2)2(p_{n}-2)^{2} and pn2p_{n}^{2} ''. To justify this conjecture, we formulate a prediction (based on a double-sieve method) for the number of twin prime pairs in this range, and compare the prediction with the real results for values of pnp_{n} up to 6500000. We also analyse what should happen for higher values of pnp_{n}. In the second part, we investigate the validity of the general Polignac's Conjecture. We predict the ratio of the number of solutions for any value of M divided by the number of solutions for M = 2, and explain how this ratio depends on the factorization of M. We compare the predictions with the real values for M up to 3000 (and for the special case 30030) in the range of from the 1000000-th prime to the 21000000-th prime.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.15487,
  title  = {On a Stricter Twin Primes Conjecture, and on the Polignac's Conjecture in general},
  author = {Giulio Morpurgo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.15487},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

11 pages, 7 figures. version 1 adds a few references, implements some TeX improvements, and fixes some English ambiguities/mistakes