Goldbach, Hurwitz, and the infinitude of primes: weaving a proof across the centuries

History of mathematics in the 18th century (01A50) History of mathematics in the 19th century (01A55) History of mathematics in the 20th century (01A60) History of number theory (11-03) Primes (11A41)

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In this article, the author investigates the history of the use of the Fermat numbers to prove that there are infinitely many primes. The fact that the Fermat numbers are pairwise relatively prime was known to Goldbach and Euler, but neither appears to have explicitly remarked that the infinitude of the primes follows as an immediate corollary. Such a remark does appear in Pólya and Szegő (as the author notes, ``without either references or claim of originality), and some have attributed the argument to Pólya. However, it had appeared several years before the publication of Pólya and Szegő, in a notebook of Hurwitz, which was not published until 1993. This article suggests, ``considering that Pólya was Hurwitz's colleague and posthumous editor, the idea may well have come directly from Hurwitz's [notebook]. Although the author does not mention it, the following statement from the preface to Pólya and Szegő may be worthy of note in this context: ``We were also permitted to incorporate some results from unpublished papers in the estate of A.~Hurwitz.

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