Reflective and Cyclic Sets of Primes
If the binary representations of the first several primes are reversed,
the resulting number is also irreducible (i.e., either a prime or 1).
This was pointed out by John Rickert, who cited the following
reflective pairs of primes
reverse prime
prime (or unit)
2 10 01 1 (or 010 to 010)
3 11 11 3
5 101 101 5
7 111 111 7
11 1011 1101 13
13 1101 1011 11
17 10001 10001 17
The first prime whose binary reversal has a proper factorization is
19 = 10011, which gives 11001=25. Still, of the primes less than
2048, more than half of them have prime reflective partners.
I suspect the proportion of such primes becomes arbitrarily small
as we go to larger and larger numbers. To illustrate, here's a
little table showing the number of such primes less than x for
various values of x:
number of primes < x
total number that give primes under
x of primes < x binary reversal ratio
-------- ------------- --------------------- -------
100 25 21 0.8400
1000 168 102 0.6071
10000 1229 509 0.4141
100000 9592 3054 0.3184
1000000 78498 20054 0.2555
10000000 664579 141772 0.2133
I would expect that the fraction of primes whose reflective pairs
are also primes is roughly what would be expected based on a random
selection of an odd number with the correct number of binary digits
for each prime. Thus it becomes increasingly less likely as the
density of primes (slowly) decreases. Also, there are presumably
infinitely many such prime pairs, although I don't know how to
prove it.
One interesting approach to this problem might be based on interpreting
the binary representations as polynomials with reciprocal roots,
as discussed in The Fundamental Theorem For Palindromic Polynomials.
By the way, here's some C code for counting reflective pairs:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <math.h>
unsigned long ic,d,nmax, nn, n, i, imax, mm, kk, aa[30];
unsigned long ictot,ptot;
main ()
{
nmax=1000;
for(nn=3;nn<=nmax;nn=nn+2)
{
ic=0;for(d=3;d<sqrt(nn+1);d=d+2)if(nn%d==0)ic=1;
if(ic==0)
{
for(i=0;i<31;i++)aa[i]=0;
n=nn;i=0;
while(n>0){aa[i]=n%2;n=(n-aa[i])/2;i++;}imax=i-1;
mm=0;for(i=0;i<=imax;i++)mm=2*mm+aa[i];
ic=0;for(d=3;d<sqrt(mm+1);d=d+2)if(mm%d==0)ic=1;
ictot=ictot+ic; ptot=ptot+1;
printf(" %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu \n",ptot,nn,mm,ic,ictot);
}
}
}
On a slightly related point, we can also consider "complete cyclic
sets of primes", i.e., primes whose base-b expansions are primes
under all the rotations of their digits. Obviously there are none
in the base 2 other than repunits, i.e., primes of the form 2^p - 1.
However, for any higher base there exist complete cyclical prime
sets. Focusing on the base 10, some trivial examples of two-digit
cyclic pairs of primes are
11 13 37 17 79
11 31 73 71 97
For slightly less trivial examples, we have the three-digit cyclical
prime sets
113 197 199 337
311 719 919 733
131 971 991 373
Among four-digit decimal numbers the only cyclic sets of primes are
1193 3779
3119 9377
9311 7937
1931 7793
Likewise among the five-digit decimal numbers we have only the sets
11939 19937
91193 71993
39119 37199
93911 93719
19391 99371
Finally, among six-digit decimal numbers the only cyclic sets of
primes are
193939 199933
919393 319993
391939 331999
939193 933199
393919 993319
939391 999331
There are no complete cyclic sets of decimal primes with 7 or 8 digits.
The next known cycle set is the repunit with 19 digits, then the repunits
with 23, 317, 1031 digits, and so on. If we exclude repunits, it is not
known if there are any complete cyclic sets of primes in the base 10 with
more than 6 digits.
Of course, we can also find cyclic sets of primes in other bases. For
example, in the base 7 we have the set
11515
51151
15115
51511
15151
Also, whenever a repunit is a prime, it gives a degenerate cyclic set,
such as the number 1111111 in the base 3 (which equals the prime 1093
in decimal).
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