Related papers: How did Fermat discover his theorem?

In 1837, Dirichlet proved that there are infinitely many primes in any arithmetic progression in which the terms do not all share a common factor. We survey implicit and explicit uses of Dirichlet characters in presentations of Dirichlet's…

Marco Buratti's conjecture states that if $p$ is a prime and $L$ a multiset containing $p-1$ non-zero elements from the integers modulo $p$, then there exists a Hamiltonian path in the complete graph of order $p$ with edge lengths in $L$.…

James Maynard has taken the analytic number theory world by storm in the last decade, proving several important and surprising theorems, resolving questions that had seemed far out of reach. He is perhaps best known for his work on small…

We prove some polynomial identities from which we deduce congruences modulo $p^2$ for the Fermat quotient $\frac{2^p-2}{p}$ for any odd prime $p$ (Proposition 1 and Theorem 1). These congruences are simpler than the one obtained by…

The Riemann hypothesis, one of the most important open problems in pure mathematics, implies the most profound secret of prime numbers. One of the most interesting approaches to solve this hypothesis is to connect the problem with the…

We present a self-contained elementary and detailed exposition of Mertens' own proof of his theorem on the divergence of the series of the reciprocals of the primes and compare it with the modern proofs. His proof contains explicit…

The author shows that there are infinitely many primes $p$ such that for any nonzero integer $a$, $p-a$ is divisible by a square $d^2 > p^{\frac{1}{2}+\frac{1}{700}}$. The exponent $\frac{1}{2}+\frac{1}{700}$ improves Merikoski's…

A primorial prime is a prime number of the form $p_n\# \pm 1$ where $p_n\#$ denotes the product of all primes less than or equal to $p_{n}$, the $n$-th prime. We show that the probability along the lines of Mertens' Theorem that either…

Fractions $\frac{p}{q} \in [0,1)$ with prime denominator $q$ written in decimal have a curious property described by Midy's Theorem, namely that two halves of their period (if it is of even length $2n$) sum up to $10^n-1$. A number of…

An efficient integer factorization algorithm would reduce the security of all variants of the RSA cryptographic scheme to zero. Despite the passage of years, no method for efficiently factoring large semiprime numbers in a classical…

Let $p$ be a prime. We define $S(p)$ the smallest number $k$ such that every positive integer is a sum of at most $k$ squares of integers that are not divisible by $p$. In this article, we prove that $S(2)=10$, $S(3)=6$, $S(5)=5$, and…

Let $\mathcal{P}_r$ denote an almost-prime with at most $r$ prime factors, counted according to multiplicity. In this paper, it is proved that for $\alpha\in\mathbb{R}\backslash\mathbb{Q},\,\beta\in\mathbb{R}$ and $0<\theta<10/1561$, there…

We present some new ideas on important problems related to primes. The topics of our discussion are: simple formulae for primes, twin primes, Sophie Germain primes, prime tuples less than or equal to a predefined number, and their…

We prove a couple of related theorems including Legendre's and Andrica's conjecture. Key to the proofs is an algorithm that delivers the exact upper bound on the greatest gap that can occur in a combinatorial game with the set of P primes…

A famous conjecture of Artin asserts that any integer $a$ that is neither $-1$ nor a square should be a primitive root (mod $p$) for a positive proportion of primes $p$. Moreover, using a heuristic argument, Artin guessed an explicit…

For integer a let us consider the sequence X_a={x_0,x_1,x_2,...} defined by x_0=a, x_1=1 and, for n>=1, x_{n+1}=x_n+x_{n-1}. We say that a prime p divides X_a if p divides at least one term of the sequence. It is easy to see that every…

A classical problem in analytic number theory is to study the distribution of $\alpha p$ modulo 1, where $\alpha$ is irrational and $p$ runs over the set of primes. We consider the subsequence generated by the primes $p$ such that $p+2$ is…

Solitary numbers are shrouded with mystery. A folklore conjecture assert that 10 is a solitary number i.e. it has no friends. In this article, we establish that if $N$ is a friend of $10$ then it must be odd square with at least seven…

Let $b$ be an integer greater than or equal to $2$. For any integer $n\in \left[b^{\lambda-1}, b^{\lambda}-1\right]$, we denote by $R_\lambda (n)$ the reverse of $n$ in base $b$, obtained by reversing the order of the digits of $n$. We…

It is curious to learn that Enrico Fermi knew how to base probabilistic inference on Bayes theorem, and that some influential notes on statistics for physicists stem from what the author calls elsewhere, but never in these notes, {\it the…