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Science 2 January 1998:
Vol. 279. no. 5347, p. 31
DOI: 10.1126/science.279.5347.31

Research News

MATHEMATICS:
Sieving Prime Numbers From Thin Ore

Barry Cipra

Mathematicians have known since Euclid that there is an infinite number of prime numbers. For the last 100 years, they have even had a good way to determine, approximately, how many primes there are up to any given number. But the finer points of how primes are distributed remain, by and large, mysterious. In particular, mathematicians are almost always unable to take an infinite but sparsely distributed set of integers, such as the values of n2 + 1, and tell how rich in primes it is.


Illustration
Prime cut. The sieve captures the primes in the sequence of numbers of the form a2 + b4, up to 100.

ILLUSTRATION: L. CARROLL


That barrier is beginning to yield. In what number theorists are calling a major breakthrough, two mathematicians have developed powerful new techniques for assaying such "thin" subsets of integers for primes. As John Friedlander of the University of Toronto and Henryk Iwaniec of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, report in a paper to appear in the Annals of Mathematics, they have refined a tool known as the asymptotic sieve, developed in the 1970s by Enrico Bombieri of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their first conquest: a remarkably thin sequence consisting of numbers of the form a2 + b4. Friedlander and Iwaniec's new sieve shows that even though most such numbers are composite--products of prime factors--the sequence includes an infinite number of primes.

"This is totally new," says Bombieri. The conclusion, he adds, "is what you would expect from heuristic arguments, but to prove things is another matter!" In his opinion, Friedlander and Iwaniec have written "one of the most important papers in analytic number theory of the century." It "will find a lot of applications" in exploring the distribution of primes.

Roughly speaking, a mathematical sieve determines the abundance of primes in a long list of numbers by estimating how many numbers remain when multiples of small primes are removed--a procedure that sifts out most composite numbers. For example, of the numbers between 169 and 289 (the squares of the primes 13 and 17), roughly half remain when you delete the even numbers, two-thirds of those remain after the multiples of 3 are removed, etc. Sieving the 120 numbers in the sequence yields an estimate of 120 x (1/2) x (2/3) x (4/5) x (6/7) x (10/11) x (12/13) = 23 primes. That's close to the exact count, 22. Similar sieves can be designed for other number sequences. The real work comes in analyzing the errors in such estimates to get rigorous results.

The errors are easiest to estimate for "dense" sequences such as 1, 5, 9, 13, etc.--a progression that contains roughly one-fourth of all numbers up to a given size. But Friedlander and Iwaniec's sequence contains a vanishingly small fraction of the integers. That thinness makes it impossible to estimate the errors in the usual way, putting the sequence out of the reach of previous sieves. "Nobody dreamed you could analyze such sequences," says Bombieri.

The new techniques rely on special algebraic properties of the formula a2 + b4. In a number system known as the Gaussian integers, which enlarges the set of ordinary integers by including i, the square root of -1, such numbers can always be factored as (a + b2i) (a - b2i). By putting their numbers into this form, Friedlander and Iwaniec were able to exploit the well-developed theory of algebraic numbers to get a handle on the errors when they applied their sieve.

The combination of algebraic number theory and sieve techniques is what Peter Sarnak of Princeton University finds most impressive. "These are two different worlds, algebra and the sieve," he notes. But because the technique relies on properties found in only a small fraction of sequences, many of sieve theory's dearest problems still look hopeless. In particular, numbers of the form n2 + 1--1, 2, 5, 10, 17, 26, etc.--almost certainly include an infinite number of primes; indeed, number theorists have even conjectured an estimate for how many there are up to any given integer in the sequence. But no proof appears to be forthcoming. Number theorists are also convinced that each interval between consecutive squares contains at least one prime, but have no idea how to prove it.

"The answer to most of these questions is, we don't know," says Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the University of Georgia in Athens. "It's frightening how pathetic our knowledge is!"





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