You are here
Home ›Wilson's primeth recurrence
Primary tabs
Wilson’s primeth recurrence
Define to be the -th prime number (for example, ). Then define the recurrence and for . This is Wilson’s primeth recurrence which results in the sequence 1, 2, 3, 5, 11, 31, 127, 709, 5381, 52711, 648391, 9737333, 174440041, … (A7097 in Sloane’s OEIS). Given the prime counting function , the recurrence should check out thus: .
It suffices to mention Euclid’s proof that there are infinitely many primes to show that this recurrence is also infinite. However, the terms of this recurrence quickly become large enough to show the limitations of today’s computational devices. Robert G. Wilson provided Sloane with just 15 terms. The last of those was shown to be erroneous by Paul Zimmerman, who was able to extend the known sequence by just two more terms. In 2007, David Baugh discovered two more terms.
References
- 1 N. J. A. Sloane, “My Favorite Integer Sequences” Sequences and their Applications (Proceedings of SETA ’98), Springer-Verlag, London, 1999, pp. 103-130.
Mathematics Subject Classification
11A41 Primes- Forums
- Planetary Bugs
- HS/Secondary
- University/Tertiary
- Graduate/Advanced
- Industry/Practice
- Research Topics
- LaTeX help
- Math Comptetitions
- Math History
- Math Humor
- PlanetMath Comments
- PlanetMath System Updates and News
- PlanetMath help
- PlanetMath.ORG
- Strategic Communications Development
- The Math Pub
- Testing messages (ignore)
- Other useful stuff
Recent Activity
new question: Sorry to steal a few minutes of your time for this question, but i honestly don't know what else to do. by Whrazithar
new question: equality of the determinants of submatrices of an orthogonal matrix by ismayli
Jun 11
new correction: Typo by suitangi
Jun 2
new question: Creating another set with same cardinality. by hkkass
Jun 1
new image: ProblemOneRevised by unlord
new Education: Chapter II by rspuzio
May 31
new collection: The Calculus by Davis and Brenke by rspuzio
new question: Proofs by weixifan
new question: Summation Integration Question by trevor.nickle
May 27
new correction: typo+finite measure hypothesis by Filipe


