English

The jumping champion conjecture

Number Theory 2015-09-23 v2

Abstract

An integer dd is called a jumping champion for a given xx if dd is the most common gap between consecutive primes up to xx. Occasionally several gaps are equally common. Hence, there can be more than one jumping champion for the same xx. For the nnth prime pnp_{n}, the nnth primorial pnp_{n}^{\sharp} is defined as the product of the first nn primes. In 1999, Odlyzko, Rubinstein and Wolf provided convincing heuristics and empirical evidence for the truth of the hypothesis that the jumping champions greater than 1 are 4 and the primorials p1,p2,p3,p4,p5,...p_{1}^{\sharp}, p_{2}^{\sharp}, p_{3}^{\sharp}, p_{4}^{\sharp}, p_{5}^{\sharp}, ..., that is, 2,6,30,210,2310,....2, 6, 30, 210, 2310, .... In this paper, we prove that an appropriate form of the Hardy-Littlewood prime kk-tuple conjecture for prime pairs and prime triples implies that all sufficiently large jumping champions are primorials and that all sufficiently large primorials are jumping champions over a long range of xx.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1102.4879,
  title  = {The jumping champion conjecture},
  author = {D. A. Goldston and A. H. Ledoan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1102.4879},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

19 pages, 1 table

R2 v1 2026-06-21T17:30:54.396Z