In number theory, Dirichlet's theorem, also called the Dirichlet prime number theorem, states that for any two positive coprime integers a and d, there are infinitely many primes of the form a + nd, where n is also a positive integer.
In other words, there are infinitely many primes that are congruent to a modulo d. The numbers of the form a + nd form an arithmetic progression and Dirichlet's theorem states that this sequence contains infinitely many prime numbers.
Stronger forms of Dirichlet's theorem state that for any such arithmetic progression, the sum of the reciprocals of the prime numbers in the progression diverges and that different such arithmetic progressions with the same modulus have approximately the same proportions of primes.
Equivalently, the primes are evenly distributed (asymptotically) among the congruence classes modulo d containing a's coprime to d. The theorem is named after the German mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, who proved it in 1837.
The primes of the form 4n + 3 are (sequence A002145 in the OEIS) They correspond to the following values of n: (sequence A095278 in the OEIS) The strong form of Dirichlet's theorem implies that is a divergent series.
The following table lists several arithmetic progressions with infinitely many primes and the first few ones in each of them.
We can generate some forms of primes by using an iterative method.
We then continue this process to find successive primes of the form
It is natural to ask about the way the primes are shared between the various arithmetic progressions for a given value of d (there are d of those, essentially, if we do not distinguish two progressions sharing almost all their terms).
The answer is given in this form: the number of feasible progressions modulo d — those where a and d do not have a common factor > 1 — is given by Euler's totient function Further, the proportion of primes in each of those is For example, if d is a prime number q, each of the q − 1 progressions (all except
When compared to each other, progressions with a quadratic nonresidue remainder have typically slightly more elements than those with a quadratic residue remainder (Chebyshev's bias).
In 1737, Euler related the study of prime numbers to what is known now as the Riemann zeta function: he showed that the value
[3] This special case of Dirichlet's theorem can be proven using cyclotomic polynomials.
[4] The general form of the theorem was first conjectured by Legendre in his attempted unsuccessful proofs of quadratic reciprocity[5] — as Gauss noted in his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae[6] — but it was proved by Dirichlet (1837) with Dirichlet L-series.
The proof is modeled on Euler's earlier work relating the Riemann zeta function to the distribution of primes.
The theorem represents the beginning of rigorous analytic number theory.
Atle Selberg (1949) gave an elementary proof.
The proof of this statement requires some calculus and analytic number theory (Serre 1973).
The particular case a = 1 (i.e., concerning the primes that are congruent to 1 modulo some n) can be proven by analyzing the splitting behavior of primes in cyclotomic extensions, without making use of calculus (Neukirch 1999, §VII.6).
In particular, the proof of the example of infinitely many primes of the form
makes an argument similar to the one made in the proof of Euclid's theorem (Silverman 2013).
The proof is given below: We want to prove that there are infinitely many primes of the form
Assume, for contradiction, that there are only finitely many primes of the form
The Bunyakovsky conjecture generalizes Dirichlet's theorem to higher-degree polynomials.
Whether or not even simple quadratic polynomials such as x2 + 1 (known from Landau's fourth problem) attain infinitely many prime values is an important open problem.
Dickson's conjecture generalizes Dirichlet's theorem to more than one polynomial.
Linnik's theorem (1944) concerns the size of the smallest prime in a given arithmetic progression.
Linnik proved that the progression a + nd (as n ranges through the positive integers) contains a prime of magnitude at most cdL for absolute constants c and L. Subsequent researchers have reduced L to 5.
An analogue of Dirichlet's theorem holds in the framework of dynamical systems (T. Sunada and A. Katsuda, 1990).
Shiu showed that any arithmetic progression satisfying the hypothesis of Dirichlet's theorem will in fact contain arbitrarily long runs of consecutive prime numbers.