Mills’ constant

Find the smallest real positive number $M$ such that $\lfloor M^{3^{n}}\rfloor$ is a prime number for any integer $n>0$ . This is Mills’ constant. Assuming that the Riemann hypothesis is true, the constant’s value would be approximately 1.3063778838630806904686144926026 (see A051021 in Sloane’s OEIS). According to Caldwell and Cheng, Mills’ original paper “contained no numerics,” it only proved the existence of such a number; moreover it referred to $\lfloor M^{c^{n}}\rfloor$ , and it is those who hunt for the specific value of $M$ who often choose $c=3$ . Armed with these assignments and assumptions (including certain probable primes), Caldwell and Cheng computed almost seven thousand base 10 digits of Mills’ constant. The first few primes generated by Mills’ constant would be 2, 11, 1361, 2521008887, etc. (listed in A051254).

References

1 C. K. Caldwell & Y. Cheng, “Determining Mills’ Constant and a Note on Honaker’s Problem” J. Integer Sequences 8 (2005): 05.4.1
2 W. H. Mills, “A prime-representing function”, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 53 (1947): 604

Title	Mills’ constant
Canonical name	MillsConstant
Date of creation	2013-03-22 16:42:18
Last modified on	2013-03-22 16:42:18
Owner	PrimeFan (13766)
Last modified by	PrimeFan (13766)
Numerical id	4
Author	PrimeFan (13766)
Entry type	Definition
Classification	msc 11A41
Synonym	Mills constant
Synonym	Mills’s constant