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Extending Matt Parker's List: 4 Primes p where tan(p) > p

Posted 11 months ago
POSTED BY: Greg Hurst
4 Replies

I am Jacob, the person who originally sent the question and the 46-digit lowest prime p for which tan(p)>p to Matt Parker. Matt mentions me in his video. I just saw your post now, and it is wonderful that you have published your method and results for the next three terms in the series of such numbers. In the discussions that followed Matt Parker's video, somebody did calculate all three of these three extra terms, but I do not know if this was you or someone else.

It is not clear to me whether these are all properly proven primes or probable primes; maybe you can clarify this.

I remember at the time I posed the original question that I estimated that each term could be expected to have about 30 times as many digits as the previous term, which is why the 46000-digit term was surprising, but maybe not statistically impossible.

I suppose there are two questions that might be of interest:
1) Can one prove that the sequence of primes for which tan(p)>p is infinite ? There is some discussion about this on OEIS (A249836)
2) Is there any significance to this sequence? Probably not, but one thought is this: The numerator and denominator of the convergent rational approximations to pi/2 are necessarily mutually prime. The numerators form terms of this sequence so they are primes by definition. Therefore, the statistical spreads of the primes, and the convergents to pi/2 are not fully independent, so it might not be true that the chance of a number being in this sequence can be calculated by multiplying the chance of finding a prime with the chance of finding an unusually good rational approximation to pi/2. It would be interesting to see an analysis of this; something of which I am not capable.

Another thing that it is tempting to ask is whether a 5th term could be found. Matt Parker quotes me in his video as saying that there is no chance of finding a second term, and it did not take long for me to be proven totally wrong about this.

Lastly, since you now have a sequence of 4 integers, it might be nice if you post the series on OEIS. It might be the fastest-growing series in all of OEIS. I do not know how welcoming OEIS would be of a 46000 digit number!

POSTED BY: Jacob Undeclared
Posted 6 months ago

Hi Jacob,

Thanks for the reply!

That was not me in the youtube comments. Though I just scanned through them and only saw 2.308358707825588 * 10^1016 mentioned through the continued fractions method.

I would wager these primes here are not proven. I attempted to run ProvablePrimeQ on these, but I never got an answer back in a reasonable amount of time. Of course there are probably better tools for this out there.

I would imagine that there are infinite number of these primes, but their occurrence gets rarer and rarer. Of course I base this off of asymptotics alone -- a good intuition builder, but not necessarily correct. I'd like to try to push this to a 5th prime if I ever get a chance, or rather if I get a change to leave my computer running for a week or two or so.

I contacted Matt Parker awhile back showing the next three terms in the series, but never heard back. I was hoping this post might reach him too. I think these two methods would make a nice video on his channel! Though seems he's off doing bigger things like working with elections, and moon landings these days...

POSTED BY: Greg Hurst

Hi Greg. For some utterly silly reason, I was able to prove the primality of the third number in the sequence (with 35085 digits) via cm 0.4.4 [ECPP], and have uploaded the certificate to factordb (where it is currently verifying). This took about 3 weeks of computation on a somewhat powerful desktop. https://factordb.com/index.php?id=1100000008081941366

I didn't start on the other number because it was occupied doing other things, but that would take about 6 weeks to prove via the same methods.

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