Talk:Prime numbers

From TheTangentSpace

Congratulations Tyler! Your "an odd number is prime iff it can't be represented as the sum of an odd number of consecutive odd numbers" is a gem. Is it new? A search of the web hasn't found its like yet. Can anyone help here?

Hope to be able to add some connections to sieves in the near future.

Yours,djw--203.102.44.4 02:06, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

originality

Thanks, djw!

As you emailed me, someone has at least found a very similar result before.

In general, results like this that involve only elementary methods with short proofs are very rarely original. So I'm not really surprised. But it is still a "cute" fact and perhaps there are still interesting and new ways to extend or use similar ideas to this.

Tyler 05:54, 19 June 2009 (UTC)