Processing math: 100%

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Palindromic primes which are sums of 3 consecutive primes

OEIS sequence A113846 lists palindromic primes q which are the sums of 3 consecutive primes p1, p2, p3 such that p2 is also a palindromic prime.

Theorem: All terms of A113846 have an odd number of digits and the first digit (and last digit) is either 3 or 9. In addition, p2 and p3 have the same first digit and p2 and p3 have the same number of digits as q. The first digit of p2 (and p3) is equal to the first digit of q divided by 3, i.e. if the first digit of q is 3, then the first digit of p2 and p3 is 1.

Proof: First note that all palindromes with an even number of digits is divisible by 11. Let p1, p2, p3 be 3 consecutive primes such that p2 is a palindrome and q=p1+p2+p3 is a palindromic prime.  It is clear that q,p2>11 and have a odd number of digits since the first term of A113846 is 31513.
The first digit of p2 cannot be 2 since p2 is odd. Next we show that the first digit of p2 is either 1 or 3.
Let k be an even integer such that p2 has k+1 digits. Suppose the first digit of p2 is 4 or larger, i.e. 410kp2<10k+1. Then by Bertrand's postulate (or Bertrand-Chebyshev theorem), p1p22 and p32p2. This implies that 10k+1>p1210k, 410k<p3210k+1 and thus 10k+1<q<410k+1, i.e. q has an even number of digits, a contradiction.
Next we show that the first digit of q is 3 or 9. To do this, we need a stronger result than Bertrand's postulate for the prime gap. Since p2>647, Rohrback and Weis's 1964 result [1] shows that p11213p2 and p31413p2.
This shows that 21213p2q3113p2. Since q is prime, it cannot start with the digit 5. If p2 start with the digit 1, then 210kq621310k and thus q must start with the digit 3.
If p2 start with the digit 3, then 8101310kq1241310k. Since q<10k+1, this means that q must start with the digit 9.
Clearly p3 must have the same number of digits as p2 and as q.
Finally, we show that p3 has the same starting digit as p2. Suppose p2 starts with the digit 1. If p3 has a different starting digit, this must mean that p3210k, i.e.
p21111310k, p1111916910k and q410k, a contradiction.
Suppose p2 start with the digit 3. If p3 has a different starting digit, this must mean that p3410k, i.e.
p2391310k, p136916910k and q10k+1, a contradiction. QED

This argument also shows that to search for terms, for each k, one only needs to consider for p2 the palindromic primes in the ranges (10k,171910k) and (310k,381910k) which amount to approximately 0.7910k2 palindromes to consider rather than a full search of 1010k2 palindromes of length k+1.

Conjecture: For all terms in A113846, the corresponding primes p1 has the same number of digits and the same first digit as p2 and p3.

References:
1. H. Rohrback and J. Weis, "Zum finiten Fall des Bertrandschen Postulats", J. Reine Angew. Math., 214/215 (1964), 432–440.

No comments:

Post a Comment