Prime Chains and Pratt Trees
| JOINT PU/IAS NUMBER THEORY SEMINAR | |
| Topic: | Prime Chains and Pratt Trees |
| Speaker: | Kevin Ford |
| Affiliation: | The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| Date: | Thursday, February 14 |
| Time/Room: | 4:30pm - 5:30pm/S-101 |
A sequence of primes p_1, ..., p_k is called a prime chain if p_j | (p_{j+1}-1) for each j ; e.g. 3, 7, 29, 59. We will discuss problems about counting prime chains with certain properties, and about the existence of prime chains with various properties. The Pratt tree for a prime p is the tree with root node p and below p are the Pratt trees of the odd prime factors of p-1. Example: 79
/ \
3 13
\
3
We are concerned with the normal and extremal behavior of the depth of such trees.