Landau's problems

At the 1912 International Congress of Mathematicians, Edmund Landau listed four basic problems about primes. These problems were characterised in his speech as "unattackable at the present state of science" and are now known as Landau's problems. They are as follows:

1. Goldbach's conjecture: Can every even integer greater than 2 be written as the sum of two primes?
2. Twin prime conjecture: Are there infinitely many primes p such that p + 2 is prime?
3. Legendre's conjecture: Does there always exist at least one prime between consecutive perfect squares?
4. Are there infinitely many primes p such that p − 1 is a perfect square? In other words: Are there infinitely many primes of the form n² + 1? (sequence A002496 in OEIS).

As of 2016, all four problems are unresolved.

Progress toward solutions

Goldbach's conjecture

Vinogradov's theorem proves Goldbach's weak conjecture for sufficiently large n. In 2013 Harald Helfgott proved the weak conjecture for all odd numbers greater than 5.^[1][2][3]

Chen's theorem proves that for all sufficiently large n, $2n=p+q$ where p is prime and q is either prime or semiprime. Montgomery and Vaughan showed that the exceptional set (even numbers not expressible as the sum of two primes) was of density zero.^[4]

Tomohiro Yamada proved an explicit version of Chen's theorem:^[5] every even number greater than $e^{e^{36}} \approx 1.7\cdot10^{1872344071119348}$ is the sum of a prime and a product of at most two primes.

Twin prime conjecture

Yitang Zhang^[6] showed that there are infinitely many prime pairs with gap bounded by 70 million, and this result has been improved to gaps of length 246 by a collaborative effort.^[7] Under the generalized Elliott–Halberstam conjecture this was improved to 6, extending earlier work by Maynard^[8] and Goldston, Pintz & Yıldırım.^[9]

Chen showed that there are infinitely many primes p (later called Chen primes) such that p+2 is either a prime or a semiprime.

Legendre's conjecture

It suffices to check that each prime gap starting at p is smaller than $2 \sqrt p$. A table of maximal prime gaps shows that the conjecture holds to 4×10¹⁸.^[10] A counterexample near 10¹⁸ would require a prime gap fifty million times the size of the average gap. Matomäki shows that there are at most $x^{1/6}$ exceptional primes followed by gaps larger than $\sqrt{2p}$; in particular,

$\sum_{\stackrel{p_{n+1}-p_n>x^{1/2}}{x\le p_n\le 2x}}p_{n+1}-p_n\ll x^{2/3}.$^[11]

A result due to Ingham shows that there is a prime between $n^3$ and $(n+1)^3$ for every large enough n.^[12]

Near-square primes

The Friedlander–Iwaniec theorem shows that infinitely many primes are of the form $x^2+y^4$.^[13]

Iwaniec showed that there are infinitely many numbers of the form $n^2+1$ with at most two prime factors.^[14][15]

In the opposite direction, the Brun sieve shows that there are $O(\sqrt x/\log x)$ such primes up to x.

Notes

1. Helfgott, H.A. (2013). "Major arcs for Goldbach's theorem". arXiv:1305.2897 [math.NT].
2. Helfgott, H.A. (2012). "Minor arcs for Goldbach's problem". arXiv:1205.5252 [math.NT].
3. Helfgott, H.A. (2013). "The ternary Goldbach conjecture is true". arXiv:1312.7748 [math.NT].
4. Montgomery, H. L.; Vaughan, R. C. (1975). "The exceptional set in Goldbach's problem" (PDF). Acta Arithmetica 27: 353–370.
5. Yamada, Tomohiro (2015-11-11). "Explicit Chen's theorem". arXiv:1511.03409 [math.NT].
6. Yitang Zhang, Bounded gaps between primes, Annals of Mathematics 179 (2014), pp. 1121–1174 from Volume 179 (2014), Issue 3
7. D.H.J. Polymath (2014). "Variants of the Selberg sieve, and bounded intervals containing many primes". Research in the Mathematical Sciences 1 (12). arXiv:1407.4897. doi:10.1186/s40687-014-0012-7. MR 3373710.
8. J. Maynard, Small gaps between primes. To appear, Annals of Mathematics.
9. Daniel Alan Goldston, Yoichi Motohashi, János Pintz and Cem Yalçın Yıldırım, Small Gaps between Primes Exist. Proceedings of the Japan Academy, Series A Mathematical Sciences 82 4 (2006), pp. 61-65.
10. Jens Kruse Andersen, Maximal Prime Gaps.
11. Kaisa Matomäki (2007). "Large differences between consecutive primes". Quarterly Journal of Mathematics 58: 489–518. doi:10.1093/qmath/ham021..
12. Ingham, A. E. (1937). "On the difference between consecutive primes". Quarterly Journal of Mathematics Oxford 8 (1): 255–266. doi:10.1093/qmath/os-8.1.255.
13. Friedlander, John; Iwaniec, Henryk (1997), "Using a parity-sensitive sieve to count prime values of a  polynomial", PNAS 94 (4): 1054–1058, doi:10.1073/pnas.94.4.1054, PMC 19742, PMID 11038598.
14. Iwaniec, H. (1978). "Almost-primes represented by quadratic polynomials". Inventiones Mathematicae 47 (2): 178–188. doi:10.1007/BF01578070.
15. Robert J. Lemke Oliver (2012). "Almost-primes represented by quadratic polynomials" (PDF). Acta Arithmetica 151: 241–261. doi:10.4064/aa151-3-2..

External links

• Weisstein, Eric W., "Landau's Problems", MathWorld.