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Two Plausible Things That Cannot Both Be True

17 pointsby jaybosamiyaabout 9 years ago

3 comments

nkurzabout 9 years ago
<i>The other Hardy-Littlewood conjecture is the seemingly innocuous statement that there are more primes in the first n numbers than in a string of n numbers starting anywhere else on the number line.</i><p>I feel like some important detail must have been lost in her presentation of the theorem. She uses the concrete examples &quot;There are 25 primes less than 100 and 168 less than 1,000,&quot; and then says that it&#x27;s difficult &quot;to believe that there are places along the number line where the primes bunch up enough to make up for those very dense areas&quot;.<p>Is she saying that it&#x27;s difficult to believe that there is span of 100 consecutive integers starting at some i &gt; 1 that contains more than 25 primes? And that there is some span of 1000 starting at i &gt; i that has more than 168? Or is she saying that it&#x27;s difficult to believe that there exists any n for which this is true?<p>That is to say, what does it mean for Conjecture 2 (quoted above) to be false? Does it mean that for all [1..n] there exists some span [i..i+n] that contains more primes? Or does it&#x27;s falseness mean only that there exists at least one n for which [i..i+n] contains at least as many primes as [1..n]?<p>Her emphasis on the concrete n=100 and n=1000 makes me think she&#x27;s claiming the universal &quot;for all n&quot;, but this seems almost certainly false for at least some small n.
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mchahnabout 9 years ago
&gt; I have reluctantly come to accept the fact that somewhere up there, in the vast expanse of primes, a cluster sits there outweighs the first chunk of prime numbers.<p>Just because it is possible doesn&#x27;t mean it exists. Of course the odds of finding one are negligible so we&#x27;ll probably never know for sure.
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chipperyman573about 9 years ago
Can anyone summarize this for people (such as myself) who have a hard time understanding what&#x27;s going on with all this prime number stuff?
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