English

Cantor Primes as Prime-Valued Cyclotomic Polynomials

Number Theory 2012-05-04 v2

Abstract

Cantor primes are primes p such that 1/p belongs to the middle-third Cantor set. One way to look at them is as containing the base-3 analogues of the famous Mersenne primes, which encompass all base-2 repunit primes, i.e., primes consisting of a contiguous sequence of 1's in base 2 and satisfying an equation of the form p + 1 = 2^q. The Cantor primes encompass all base-3 repunit primes satisfying an equation of the form 2p + 1 = 3^q, and I show that in general all Cantor primes > 3 satisfy a closely related equation of the form 2pK + 1 = 3^q, with the base-3 repunits being the special case K = 1. I use this to prove that the Cantor primes > 3 are exactly the prime-valued cyclotomic polynomials of the form Φs(3sj)1\Phi_s(3^{s^j}) \equiv 1 (mod 4). Significant open problems concern the infinitude of these, making Cantor primes perhaps more interesting than previously realised.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1203.3969,
  title  = {Cantor Primes as Prime-Valued Cyclotomic Polynomials},
  author = {Christian Salas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1203.3969},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0906.0465

R2 v1 2026-06-21T20:35:52.673Z