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Prime-Generating Recurrence

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This Demonstration explores solutions of the recurrence through the difference sequence , which exhibits complex behavior. For the initial condition , the sequence consists entirely of s and primes, making this recurrence a rare "naturally occurring" generator of primes.

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This result is not true in general: for example, letting produces , and letting produces . However, for these initial conditions, the difference sequence eventually consists entirely of s and primes. It is an unsolved problem to determine whether all initial conditions eventually produce only s and primes.

You can choose to view all terms of the difference sequence or only the terms which are not .

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Contributed by: Eric Rowland (July 2008)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

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This recurrence was discovered at the 2003 NKS Summer School (NKS|Online) by a group led by Matt Frank.

This Demonstration allows initial conditions . For , is for .

For more information, see E. S. Rowland, "A Natural Prime-Generating Recurrence," Journal of Integer Sequences [online], 11(2), 2008.

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