4

I don't know if this is the right place to ask this question. Please excuse my ignorance if it is not.

I like to play with integers. I have been doing this since my childhood. I spend a lot of time looking up new integer sequences on OEIS. Last week I stumbled upon a unique property of prime numbers. I have been searching the internet since then to find if there are any papers talking about this property and haven't found any. I want to publish it. I am not a mathematician but I am an engineer and I can write a decent paper to clearly express the property. I haven't attempted to prove this property. It is just an observation that I verified upto the largest known prime number (http://primes.utm.edu/). It holds!

The problem is I do not want to divulge this property for fear of being denied credit to its discovery. How should I disseminate this finding?

Again, I apologize if this is not the right place for this question.

Prometheus
  • 255
  • Could you tell us more about it without divulging it? – Daniel Donnelly Oct 22 '13 at 19:59
  • 1
    Asking a professor about it would be a good option, I think. But unfortunately, most "discoveries" like this one are rather trivial when confronted by real mathematicians.So I don't think you are hoaxing anyone here, but odds are, I would better prepare for a dissapointment.Anyways, good luck! – chubakueno Oct 22 '13 at 21:27
  • Thanks for your comments! @chubakueno From my hours on the web, I am quite sure that this property has not been discussed directly. Though I cannot deny the fact that it could be a corollary to some known property. – Prometheus Oct 22 '13 at 22:03
  • Why would you be denied credit? Putting the statement on StackExchange is a perfectly good way of putting something on record publicly. There are timestamps, witnesses, and you don't probably don't have any administrative access to the site. – Rohit Chatterjee Mar 02 '14 at 08:42
  • It would be nice to know what the property is, as if everyone kept their "discovered" properties secret, it could well be that it's all the the same thing! So publish it to avoid that. If you did publish it, place the link here. –  Jan 20 '19 at 20:39

2 Answers2

4

If you feel you really have something, you could always type up a paper and post it on the preprint archive... http://arxiv.org/ That would establish precedence and probably get you a host of feedback as well.

Bill Cook
  • 29,244
2

I believe that posting your observation here will clarify that the observation is yours.
Also as Bill Cook mentions http://arxiv.org/ would be the best place to post your discovery.
But if you don't tell us which is the ''unknown property of prime numbers'' you will never know if you are a genius, or someone who has illusions.
Share your thoughts! I really want to see something that might be new and (as you say) interesting!

Konstantinos Gaitanas
  • 9,115