Related papers: Highly biased prime number races

This is a survey article on prime number races. Chebyshev noticed in the first half of the nineteenth century that for any given value of x, there always seem to be more primes of the form 4n+3 less than x then there are of the form 4n+1.…

Let $\pi(x;q,a)$ denote the number of primes up to $x$ that are congruent to $a$ modulo $q$. A prime number race, for fixed modulus $q$ and residue classes $a_1, \ldots, a_r$, investigates the system of inequalities $\pi(x;q,a_1) >…

We confirm Chebyshev's observation that primes are strikingly more abundant in non-square residue classes modulo a fixed integer under the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis (GRH) by proving a (natural) density $1$ statement for prime counting…

In this paper we discuss the generalizations of the concept of Chebyshev's bias from two perspectives. First we give a general framework for the study of prime number races and Chebyshev's bias attached to general $L$-functions satisfying…

Chebyshev famously observed empirically that more often than not, there are more primes of the form $3 \bmod 4$ up to $x$ than of the form $1 \bmod 4$. This was confirmed theoretically much later by Rubinstein and Sarnak in a logarithmic…

Rubinstein and Sarnak have shown, conditional on the Riemann hypothesis (RH) and the linear independence hypothesis (LI) on the non-real zeros of $\zeta(s)$, that the set of real numbers $x\ge2$ for which $\pi(x)>$ li$(x)$ has a logarithmic…

We survey results about prime number races, that is, results about the relative sizes of prime counting functions $\pi_{q,a}(x)$, with $q$ fixed and $a$ varying. In particular, we describe recent work by the authors on these problems.

We continue to investigate the race between prime numbers in many residue classes modulo $q$, assuming the standard conjectures GRH and LI. We show that provided $n/\log q \rightarrow \infty$ as $q \rightarrow \infty$, we can find $n$…

Let $\pi_{q,a}(x)$ denote the number of primes $\le x$ in the progression $a$ modulo $q$. We study subtle inequities in these functions, with $q$ fixed and variable $a$ (sometimes called 'prime race problems'). It is known unconditionally…

Fix an integer $r\geq 3$. Let $q$ be a large positive integer and $a_1,...,a_r$ be distinct residue classes modulo $q$ that are relatively prime to $q$. In this paper, we establish an asymptotic formula for the logarithmic density…

We generalize current known distribution results on Shanks--R\'enyi prime number races to the case where arbitrarily many residue classes are involved. Our method handles both the classical case that goes back to Chebyshev and function…

Chebyshev was the first to observe a bias in the distribution of primes in residue classes. The general phenomenon is that if $a$ is a nonsquare\mod q and $b$ is a square\mod q, then there tend to be more primes congruent to $a\mod q$ than…

It is well known that $li(x)>\pi(x)$ (i) up to the (very large) Skewes' number $x_1 \sim 1.40 \times 10^{316}$ \cite{Bays00}. But, according to a Littlewood's theorem, there exist infinitely many $x$ that violate the inequality, due to the…

Rubinstein and Sarnak investigated systems of inequalities of the form pi(x;q,a_1) > ... > pi(x;q,a_r), where pi(x;q,a) denotes the number of primes up to x that are congruent to a mod q. They showed, under standard hypotheses on the zeros…

It has been well-observed that an inequality of the type $\pi(x;q,a) > \pi(x;q,b)$ is more likely to hold if $a$ is a non-square modulo $q$ and $b$ is a square modulo $q$ (the so-called ``Chebyshev Bias''). For instance, each of…

Under two assumptions, we determine the distribution of the difference between two functions each counting the numbers < x that are in a given arithmetic progression modulo q and the product of two primes. The two assumptions are (i) the…

Prime counting functions are believed to exhibit, in various contexts, discrepancies beyond what famous equidistribution results predict; this phenomenon is known as Chebyshev's bias. Rubinstein and Sarnak have developed a framework which…

We create a simple test for distinguishing between sets of primes and random numbers using just the sum-of-digits function. We find that the sum-of-the-digits of prime numbers does not have an equal probability of being odd or even. The…

Let P(x,d,a) denote the number of primes p<=x with p=a(mod d). Chebyshev's bias is the phenomenon that `more often' P(x;d,n)>P(x;d,r) than the other way around, where n is a quadratic non-residue mod d and r is a quadratic residue mod d. If…

We study how often exceptional configurations of irreducible polynomials over finite fields occur in the context of prime number races and Chebyshev's bias. In particular, we show that three types of biases, which we call "complete bias",…