Euclid's theorem on the infinitude of primes: a historical survey of its proofs (300 B.C.--2022) and another new proof

arXiv1202.3670MaRDI QIDQ6231078FDOQ6231078

Publication date: 16 February 2012

Abstract: In this article, we provide a comprehensive historical survey of 183 different proofs of famous Euclid's theorem on the infinitude of prime numbers. The author is trying to collect almost all the known proofs on infinitude of primes, including some proofs that can be easily obtained as consequences of some known problems or divisibility properties. Furthermore, here are listed numerous elementary proofs of the infinitude of primes in different arithmetic progressions. All the references concerning the proofs of Euclid's theorem that use similar methods and ideas are exposed subsequently. Namely, presented proofs are divided into 8 subsections of Section 2 in dependence of the methods that are used in them. {�f Related new 14 proofs (2012-2017) are given in the last subsection of Section 2.} In the next section, we survey mainly elementary proofs of the infinitude of primes in different arithmetic progressions. Presented proofs are special cases of Dirichlet's theorem. In Section 4, we give a new simple "Euclidean's proof" of the infinitude of primes.

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Congruences; primitive roots; residue systems (11A07) Arithmetic functions; related numbers; inversion formulas (11A25) (zeta (s)) and (L(s, chi)) (11M06) Multiplicative structure; Euclidean algorithm; greatest common divisors (11A05) Fibonacci and Lucas numbers and polynomials and generalizations (11B39) Sequences (mod (m)) (11B50) Binomial coefficients; factorials; (q)-identities (11B65) Primes (11A41) Factorization; primality (11A51) Primes in congruence classes (11N13) General histories, source books (01A05)

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