In doing unrelated calculations I was a bit flabbergasted when I found that the formula
f(n)=8+3(5n)
gives prime numbers for n=0,1,2,3; so I checked further and found:
Out of the first 401 natural numbers (that is, n=0,1,...,400) 19 of these have f(n) prime. They are: 0, 1, 2, 3, 7, 9, 14
19,
21,
24,
38 ,
48,
49,
59,
69,
86,
131,
174,
399. (Easily checked on Wolfram-Alpha)
I do not at all know what a reasonable number of primes would be out of this, but I expect fewer than this would be expected, given how large the numbers become. My very lax reasoning is below:
The expected density of primes given the number of primes less than 8+3(5400) (using Li(n)=∫n21log(x)dx to estimate π(x)) is about Li(3⋅5400)≈0.00155. For 200, Li(3⋅200)≈0.00357 is the approximate density. So we should expect somewhere on the order of magitude of a density of 0.002 for primes in the range 3⋅5174 to 3⋅5400.
However, since by the end of the sequence there is about 1 prime for every 200 attempts, or about 0.005, which is more than twice the expectation (granted 399 is luckily just scraping under 400).
My question: Is there any way to see if this sequence is more likely to generate primes than other sequences? Further, is this a pattern that is already known in some fashion?
Interesting side note: the same pattern holds for small numbers (I haven't checked very far) for the similar sequence g(n)=4+3(5n).
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