Why should I switch to Python? - Infinity of Primes

[Fred W. Helenius]

Greg Ewing <greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

>If someone actually came up with a formula for constructing
>primes, it would be rather large news -- isn't that one of
>the Big Unsolved Problems?

Actually, many formulas for primes are known; the catch is that
they are too inefficient for practical use, as the evaluation of
the formulas covertly includes all the work to test many numbers
for primality, or depends upon the use of a real constant that
encodes all the primes.  A few such formulas are exhibited at
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrimeFormulas.html .

The sci.math FAQ includes many additional references to formulas
for primes, see
http://www.cs.unb.ca/~alopez-o/math-faq/node36.html .

-- 
Fred W. Helenius	<fredh at ix.netcom.com>