Friday, 21 June 2013

Prime Generating Irrational Number



Does there exist an irrational number such that every time it is multiplied by 100 its integer part gives a prime number?



ϕ=0,a0a1a2a3
102nϕP,nN



Or in a more general way multiply by 10p.n, where p is a fixed prime number.




For example, let ϕ=0,1163
102ϕ=11
And 104ϕ=1163
While 11 and 1163 are primes, 63 by itself is not. So, a2ia2i+1 is not necessarily prime for iN


Answer



This is similar to right-truncatable primes, but removing two decimal digits at a time.



Equivalently, we are looking for right-truncatable primes in base 100. http://oeis.org/A076586 tells us that there are exactly 9823399067 such primes. Hence there is no infinite example and no such irrational number.



For the more general question of multiplying by 10pn, we can note that the natural density of primes is 0, and that arbitrarily large prime gaps exists, to conclude that the number of right-truncatable primes in any given base is almost certainly finite. However, I don't believe a proof exists. See for example Proof for finite number of truncatable primes .



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