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Conjecture:
Let $f(x,y,z)=xy+xz+yz\:$ and $\: S_m=\{n\in\mathbb N|n<m\wedge f(p_n,p_{n+1},p_{n+2})\in\mathbb P\}$.
Then $|S_m|\sim \frac{m}{\ln m}$.

Computationally tested only, but I would like to see a proof.

It seems like I made a mistake with the inequality in the comment, but here are some data:

      m    m/ln m     |Sm|   pi(m)           li m     |Tm|
     10      4.34        5       4      6.1655995        6
    100     21.71       26      25     30.1261416       41
   1000    144.76      171     168    177.6096580      295
  10000   1085.74     1292    1229   1246.1372159     2234
 100000   8685.89    10102    9592   9629.8090011    12024
1000000  72382.41    82114   78794  78627.5491595
5000000 324150.19   366716  348513 348638.1150413

For comparision: $T_m=\{n\in\mathbb N|n<m\wedge f(a_n,a_{n+1},a_{n+2})\in\mathbb P\}$, where $a_n=2n+1$

enter image description here

Lehs
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  • The second symmetric function on $3$ variables, evaluated for three consecutive primes generates primes with roughly the same asymptopic behaviour as the prime counting function. Cool ! ... so ask us the question ... can we show this rigorously. – Donald Splutterwit Jul 23 '17 at 19:13
  • You have verified this computationally ... upto ? ... & can you present your evidence graphically for us ? – Donald Splutterwit Jul 23 '17 at 19:14
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    @DonaldSplutterwit: Yes, of course I want a rigorous proof. And I will supply some graphics. What I do have found is that $10^m/\ln 10^m<|S_{10^m}|<\pi (10^m)$, for m big enough. – Lehs Jul 23 '17 at 19:52
  • @Lehs In your above inequality, what is the upper bound on $m$? I assume you haven't proven this for all $m$. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think it's even known if $f$ or anything like it takes infinitely many prime values at natural numbers, which isn't anywhere near as strong as $f(p_n, p_{n+1}, p_{n+2})$ prime for infinitely many $n$. So then a proof that $|S_m|$ is unbounded alone would be significant. – M10687 Jul 23 '17 at 19:55
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    @M10687 It being prime infinitely often is fairly well established. $f$ is linear in all it's variables; just fix $x,y$ and in many cases we will be left with a linear equation in $z$ to which Dirichlet's theorem on progressions in primes can be applied. – Will Fisher Jul 23 '17 at 19:57
  • @WillFisher Of course. Disregard my comment then. – M10687 Jul 23 '17 at 19:57
  • Thanks for adding the additional info ... your quantity certainly appears to give a tight upper bound on the other three favourites. – Donald Splutterwit Jul 23 '17 at 21:08
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    See things like Bateman–Horn for the conjectured density of primes in the values of integer polynomials. As usual, did you try replacing $p_n,p_{n+1},p_{n+2}$ by non-primes ? – reuns Aug 03 '17 at 02:45
  • @reuns: not replacing primes with non-primes is a mistake I sometimes do, but what should I expect from that in this case? – Lehs Aug 03 '17 at 02:53
  • The primes are the most complicated object, so if you can replace them by the integers or at least a simpler set of integers with density $\frac{1}{\log x}$, it makes it much simpler. – reuns Aug 03 '17 at 15:22
  • @reuns: I tried $f\big(2n-1,2(n+1)-1,2(n+2)-1\big)$ but didn't got a distribution close to $x/\ln x$ – Lehs Aug 03 '17 at 15:31
  • Not close to $C x/\log x$ ? Did you look at the basic congruences of $xy+yz+xz$ when $x,y,z$ are in arithmetic progression ? – reuns Aug 03 '17 at 15:50
  • @reuns: perhaps for $C\approx 1.4$. See edited question. – Lehs Aug 03 '17 at 17:12
  • @reuns Replacing primes by integers will shift the value of the singular series. Supposing we take consecutive odd integers then we get the quadratic $3(2n+1)^2-4$, so the number of zeros mod $p$ depends on the Legendre symbol $(3/p)$. The new constant might be expressible in terms of $L$-functions. In any case this reduces to existing conjecture on polynomials of a single variable. – Erick Wong Aug 03 '17 at 22:02
  • @ErickWong I think it is a consequence of a very strong conjecture about (locally) uniform estimate for primes in polynomial values. I'm not sure how to do to estimate the number of primes $\sum_{n \le x} 1_{a n^2+b \in \mathbb{P}}$ with L-functions. – reuns Aug 03 '17 at 22:15

1 Answers1

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There appears to be little hope of a formal proof, but this is how a standard heuristic argument would treat this problem, so we can determine whether the conjecture is plausible in the vein of Bateman-Horn as mentioned by reuns.

Excluding an asymptotically small number of cases, most of the values $f(p_n,p_{n+1},p_{n+2})$ will be of size roughly $\Theta(m^2 \log^2 m)$, so if they were randomly distributed, we would expect about one in $\log(m^2\log^2 m) \sim 2 \log m$ of them to be prime, which would be $\sim m/(2 \log m)$.

But we're seeing significantly more than that. That's because those numbers are not randomly distributed: for starters, they're all odd, and that accounts for the missing factor of $2$. A random number has a $\frac12$ chance of not being divisible by $2$, but these numbers have double the chance.

However, we're not done yet. They also are unevenly distributed modulo $3$: each of $p_n,p_{n+1},p_{n+2}$ can be viewed as a uniform random sample from the non-zero residues mod $3$. Of these $8$ possible inputs to $xy+yz+zx$, $2$ of them provide $0$. So there is a $\frac34$ chance of these numbers being indivisible by $3$, versus a $\frac23$ chance for a random number: which is a factor of $\frac98$ better. Not as strong as the previous factor of $2$, but not insignificant.

It turns out we can exactly calculate this factor for any given prime modulus $p$: the number of solutions to $xy+yz+zx \equiv 0 \pmod p$ with $x,y,z$ all non-zero is easy to compute, since it's equivalent to $z(x+y) \equiv -xy$. A straightforward calculation gives $(p-1)(p-2)$ zero-producing combinations out of $(p-1)^3$, for a $\frac{p-2}{(p-1)^2}$ chance of being divisible by $p$, which is an advantage of $\frac{p(p^2-3p+3)}{(p-1)^3}$.

For large $p$ this fraction is approximately $1 + \frac{1}{p^2}$, so we can combine all of these multiplicative factors for all primes $p$ into a convergent product yielding a single constant: this is the so-called singular series.

The standard heuristic underlying Bateman-Horn and similar conjectures would then predict that the number of prime values should be asymptotic to:

$$\frac{m}{2\log m}\prod_{p\text{ prime}} \frac{p(p^2-3p+3)}{(p-1)^3} \approx 1.15048 \frac{m}{\log m}.$$

This actually agrees remarkably well with your data, which shows the ratios of $|S_m|$ to $m/\log m$ are:

$$1.1521, 1.1976, 1.1813, 1.1900, 1.1630, 1.1344, 1.1313.$$

However, I don't have a good explanation for why it matches so well, since I would have expected a $O(1/\log m)$ relative error so for these small values of $m$ it should be agreeing to only one digit, not two. There may be something that miraculously cancels out the first-order error and leaves a $O(1/\log^2 m)$ relative error.

Update: For the similar sequence $T_m$, we can do a similar analysis with the polynomial $3(2n+1)^2-4$. The singular series constant (with the factor of $\frac12$ due to the quadratic growth rate) works out $$\frac12 \cdot 2 \cdot \frac32 \cdot \prod_{p\ge 5\text{ prime}}\big(1-\frac1p\big)^{-1}\big(1-\frac{(3/p)}{p}\big) \approx 2.07508,$$ where $(3/p)$ is the Legendre symbol (so $+1$ if $p \equiv 1,11$ mod $12$ and $-1$ if $p \equiv 5,7$ mod $12$).

This is significantly higher than the constant for $S_m$: much of the reason for this is that $3(2n+1)^2-4$ is lucky enough to be never divisible by any of the first four primes $2,3,5,7$ so it tends to be prime more often than a random number of the same size. The factor of about $2.07$ seems to agree very well with the first few rows of your table, so you may want to double-check the computation of $T_{100000}$ as it seems not to fit the curve.

Erick Wong
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