# Some graphs about primes

Posted by Jason Polak on 29. November 2017 · Write a comment · Categories: number-theory · Tags: , ,

Lately I've been thinking about primes, and I've plotted a few graphs to illustrate some beautiful ideas involving primes. Even though you might not always associate with primes, they are always haunting quietly in the background.

## Abundance of primes in an arithmetic progression

Let's start out with the oddest prime of all: 2. Get it? But after that, all the odd primes are either of the form $4k + 1$ or $4k + 3$. For fixed $x$, are there more primes less than $x$ of the form $4k + 1$ or the second form $4k + 3$? Let's write $\pi(4k + r,x)$ for the number of primes less than or equal to $x$ of the form $4k + r$. Here is a graph of the difference $\pi(4k+3,x) – \pi(4k+1,x)$:

Pretty neat right? It looks like this difference is wildly erratic, reaching zero after a short while with a bit of a fight and then for a really good long while the primes of the form $4k +3$ win out. So you might be tempeted to think that primes of the form $4k + 3$ become more and more abundant as $x$ increases. That would be wrong. In fact, John E. Littlewood proved that $\pi(4k +3,x)-\pi(4k + 1,x)$ switches sign infinitely often!

Of course, that must mean there are infinitely many primes of both types, and that's true and a special case of Dirichlet's theorem: there are infinitely many primes in any arithmetic progression $ax + b$ whenever $a$ and $b$ are relatively prime.
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