![]() | ||
In analytic number theory the Friedlander–Iwaniec theorem states that there are infinitely many prime numbers of the form
Contents
2, 5, 17, 37, 41, 97, 101, 137, 181, 197, 241, 257, 277, 281, 337, 401, 457, 577, 617, 641, 661, 677, 757, 769, 821, 857, 881, 977, … (sequence A028916 in the OEIS).The difficulty in this statement lies in the very sparse nature of this sequence: the number of integers of the form
History
The theorem was proved in 1997 by John Friedlander and Henryk Iwaniec. Iwaniec was awarded the 2001 Ostrowski Prize in part for his contributions to this work.
Special case
When b = 1, the Friedlander–Iwaniec primes have the form
It is conjectured (one of Landau's problems) that this set is infinite. However, this is not implied by the Friedlander–Iwaniec theorem.