About the page "Hints for Using OEIS"

[Russ Cox]

> So, for example, the search for
> Polya 1987
> does not find anything, because of that 1987,
> and one has to resort to ref:Polya ref:1987
> 
> I think that this behavior, which is not exactly intuitive,
> should be stated in the hint page.

The hints page describes what *should* be happening.
The fact that the search results disagree is a bug in the
search results.  I'll take a closer look later, but for now
rest assured that this is simply a bug in the search.

Russ




That's another error I made in formulating my question. I don't mean a
current state-of-the-art. As someone else pointed out (and it's another
mistake I made), the sequences I'm interested in are relatively "simple" --
they aren't generated using functions like nextprime or other number theory
functions. Examples include David Wilson's estimate (not proven) of an
exponent (1.59267) such that there's always a prime between n^e and (n+1)^e,
the constant D such that ] x-x/D, x [ contains a prime, etc. Thanks to
everyone for their responses!


-----Original Message-----
between a(n) and a(n+1)

> What would be the minimum required exponent (not theoretically, but from
numerical evidence?).

googling "prime number gaps bertrand conjecture" or so I found on
http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-125719.html:
"For example, if n is large enough, we can guarantee a prime in
[n,n+n^0.525]."

but without reference. In http://math.univ-lille1.fr/~ramare/Maths/gap.pdf

it is proved that ] x-x/D , x [ contains a prime number
for D = 28 314 000 and all x >= 10 726 905 041.

This is of course much better.
I just want to repeat that all of these results will *never* enable us
to prove that a given proposal for the sequence (as specified in the
"clarification") is "minimal" or "most compact" in the sense given
earlier, and I'd even dare to say that it will be rather quite easy to
*disprove* minimality for any such "mechanically constructed" sequence
(e.g. by adding "-1" to all terms following some a(n), or so).

Maximilian