The Left Hand of the Electron by Isaac Asimov

Author:Isaac Asimov
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf, epub
ISBN: 9780440947172
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 1972-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Let's lower our sights then. Is it possible to work up some useful formula that will give us not every prime, but at least only primes?

We could then grind out an infinite series of known primes by turning a formula-crank, even though we know we are skipping an infinite quantity of other primes.

Again, no (except for some specialized non-useful cases). No matter how we try to find a useful system that will yield primes only, non-primes will always sneak in. For instance, you might think that adding 1 to the product of successive primes beginning with 2 might yield only prime numbers. The numbers I got this way a little earlier in the article were 7, 31, 211, 2311-all primes! But then, the next in the series was 30,031, and that was not a prime.

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