Twin prime conjecture hypothesis

465 Views Asked by At

Let $c$ be a positive integer and fix $a=c-1$, and $b=c+1$.

Challenge: Find the largest value of $c$ such that $ac\pm1$ and $bc\pm1$ are pairs of twin primes.

For example, with $c=6$ we have $a=5$ and $b=7$ yielding twin primes $5\cdot6\pm1$ (29 and 31) and $6\cdot7\pm1$ (41 and 43).

My conjecture is that if an upper bound for $c$ can be proven, then the twin prime conjecture is false, and if it can be proven that $c$ can be arbitrarily large then an infinite number of twin prime pairs can be generated and thus the twin prime conjecture is true.

1

There are 1 best solutions below

0
On BEST ANSWER

Of course if $c$ can be taken arbitrarily large than the twin prime conjecture is true. If there are only finitely many such $c$ then the twin prime conjecture might be true or false. But the smart money says that there are infinitely many such $(a,b,c).$ To support this claim, some examples (giving only $ac-1$):

  • 10^10 + 58244
  • 10^20 + 2025560
  • 10^30 + 16004624
  • 10^40 + 53123060
  • 10^50 + 31173119
  • 10^60 + 199288424
  • 10^70 + 186691829
  • 10^80 + 446536985
  • 10^90 + 615513365
  • 10^100 + 2863537016
  • 10^110 + 1189720544
  • 10^120 + 1662005540
  • 10^130 + 5328042449

Standard number-theoretic conjectures suggest that there are infinitely many.