They are garbling this.............the last post........I pasted the graph below what I wrote...............Russian hackers and my father..........same difference....

How Many Primes Are There?

Contents:

1. Introduction: Asking the Correct Question
   • pi(x) is the number of primes less than or equal to x
   • A Table of values of pi(x)
2. The Prime Number Theorem
   • Consequence One: You can Approximate pi(x) with x/(log x - 1)
   • Consequence Two: The nth prime is about n log n
   • Consequence Three: The chance of a random integer x being prime is about 1/log x
3. History of the Prime Number Theorem and other approximations of pi(x)
4. There are better estimates!

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Primes: [ Home || Largest | Proving | How Many? | Mersenne | Glossary | Mailing List ]

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Notes: (1) Rather than fill this document with gifs like "" (which can not be displayed on some browsers and display poorly on others), I am going to just write pi(x).  (2) log x, in this document, is the natural logarithm.  This is sometimes denoted ln x, but log x is the mathematical standard.

   1. Introduction: Asking the Correct Question

Over 2,300 years ago Euclid proved that the number of primes is infinite, so two possible questions come to mind:

1. How many primes are there less than the number x?
2. There are infinitely many primes, but how big of an infinity?

This document will focus on the first question.  The second question is discussed on the page "How Big of an Infinity?."

1.1. pi(x) is the number of primes less than or equal to x

Let x be a positive real number.  The question "how many primes are there less than x?" has been asked so frequently that its answer has a name:

= pi(x) = the number of primes less than or equal to x.

The primes under 25 are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19 and 23 so pi(3) = 2, pi(10) = 4 and pi(25) = 9.  (A longer table can be found in the next sub-section.)  Look at the following graph and notice how irregular the graph of pi(x) is for small values of x.

Now back up and view a larger portion of the graph of pi(x).

So even though pi(x) is "locally" irregular, there is a definite trend to its values.  (Graph to 1,000,000.)
In this document we will study the function pi(x), the prime number theorem (which quantifies this trend) and several classical approximation to pi(x).

Table 1.  Values of pi(x)

	x	pi(x)	reference
1	10	4
2	100	25
3	1,000	168
4	10,000	1,229
5	100,000	9,592
6	1,000,000	78,498
7	10,000,000	664,579
8	100,000,000	5,761,455
9	1,000,000,000	50,847,534
10	10,000,000,000	455,052,511
11	100,000,000,000	4,118,054,813
12	1,000,000,000,000	37,607,912,018
13	10,000,000,000,000	346,065,536,839
14	100,000,000,000,000	3,204,941,750,802	[LMO85]
15	1,000,000,000,000,000	29,844,570,422,669	[LMO85]
16	10,000,000,000,000,000	279,238,341,033,925	[LMO85]
17	100,000,000,000,000,000	2,623,557,157,654,233	[DR96]
18	1,000,000,000,000,000,000	24,739,954,287,740,860	[DR96]
19	10,000,000,000,000,000,000	234,057,667,276,344,607
20	100,000,000,000,000,000,000	2,220,819,602,560,918,840
21	1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000	21,127,269,486,018,731,928
22	10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000	201,467,286,689,315,906,290
23	100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000	1,925,320,391,606,803,968,923
24	1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000	18,435,599,767,349,200,867,866	(note)
25	10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000	176,846,309,399,143,769,411,680

1.2. A Table of values of pi(x)

For the smaller values of x in this table (say to 10,000,000,000) the value of pi(x) can be found by finding and counting all of the primes. 
Before the age of computers many mathematicians formed tables of primes.  The most widely distributed was D. N. Lehmer's table of primes to 10,006,721 [Lehmer14].  By far the most amazing was a table by Kulik completed in 1867.  This table listed the smallest factors of integers (hence all the primes) up to 100,330,200!
In the 1870's Meissel developed a clever way to calculate pi(x) far beyond the known tables of primes and in 1885 (slightly mis-)calculated pi(10⁹).  Meissel's methods were simplified by D. H. Lehmer in 1959 and then in 1985 improved using sieve techniques by Lagarias, Miller and Odlyzko [LMO85].
In 1994 Deléglise and Rivat [DR96] improved the technique once again to find the values for pi(10¹⁷) and pi(10¹⁸).  Deléglise continued this work with an improved algorithm to find pi(10²⁰) and other values (see his e-mail messages of 18 Apr 1996 and 19 Jun 1996).  See Riesel94 for practical information about how these calculations are made.
Xavier Gourdon's distributed computing project determined pi(4*10²²), but stopped when they found an error of at least one in the calculation of pi(10²³).  Tomás Oliveira e Silva has extensive tables of values of pi(x) and pi₂(x). In 2007 he reevaluated pi(10²³) to get the value in the table.  This calculation was done on a single machine and verified in 2008.
The value given for pi(10²⁴) was found by an analytic methods assuming the unproven Riemann Hypothesis by J. Buethe, J. Franke, A. Jost, T. Kleinjung. Their method "is similar to the one described by Lagarias and Odlyzko, but uses the Weil explicit formula instead of complex curve integrals" (see their e-mail announcing the result in July 2010). This value was later verified unconditionally by D. J. Platt [Platt2012].
In May 2013, J. Buethe, J. Franke, A. Jost, and T. Kleinjung completed calculating pi(10^25) unconditionally, using an analytic method based on Weil's explicit formula.

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   2. The Prime Number Theorem: approximating pi(x)

Even though the distribution of primes seems random (there are (probably) infinitely many twin primes and there are (definitely) arbitrarily large gaps between primes), the function pi(x) is surprisingly well behaved: In fact, it has been proved (see the next section) that:

The Prime Number Theorem: The number of primes not exceeding x is asymptotic to x/log x.

In terms of pi(x) we would write:

The Prime Number Theorem: pi(x) ~ x/log x.

This means (roughly) that x/log x is a good approximation for pi(x)--but before we consider this and other consequences lets be a little more specific:

"a(x) is asymptotic to b(x)" and "a(x) ~ b(x)" both mean that the limit (as x approaches infinity) of the ratio a(x)/b(x) is 1.

If you have not had calculus then this means that you can make a(x)/b(x) as close to 1 as you want by just requiring that x is large enough.  Warning: a(x) ~ b(x) does not mean that a(x)-b(x) is small!  For example, x² is asymptotic to x²-x, but the difference between them, x, gets arbitrarily large as x goes to infinity.

Consequence One: You can Approximate pi(x) with x/(log x - 1)

Table 2.  pi(x) verse x/log x

x	pi(x)	x/log x	x/(log x -1)
1000	168	145	169
10000	1229	1086	1218
100000	9592	8686	9512
1000000	78498	72382	78030
10000000	664579	620420	661459
100000000	5761455	5428681	5740304

The prime number theorem clearly implies that you can use x/(log x - a) (with any constant a) to approximate pi(x).  The prime number theorem was stated with a=0, but it has been shown that a=1 is the best choice:
There are longer tables below and (of pi(x) only) above.

Example: Someone recently e-mailed me and asked for a list of all the primes with at most 300 digits.  Since the prime number theorem implies this list would have about 1.4*10²⁹⁷ entries we know that there can be no such list!

Note that Pierre Dusart [Dusart99] showed that if x>598 then

(x/log x)(1 + 0.992/log x) < pi(x) <(x/log x)(1 + 1.2762/log x)

(The upper bound holds for all x > 1.)  This gives a tight bound for larger x. Note x/log x< pi(x) for x> 10.

Consequence Two: The nth prime is about n log n

Let p(n) be the nth prime.  It is easy to show that the prime number theorem is equivalent to the statement

Theorem: p(n) ~ n log n

[see Hardy and Wright, page 10].  A better estimate is

Theorem: p(n) ~ n (log n + log log n - 1)

[see Ribenboim95, pg. 249].

Example: These formulae predict that the one millionth prime is about 13,800,000 and 15,400,000 respectively.  In fact, the one millionth prime is 15,485,863.

There have been many improvements on these bounds; for example, Robin [Robin83] showed that if n>8601 [actually Robin erroneously used 7021], then

n (log n + log log n - 1.0073) < p(n) < n (log n + log log n - 0.9385)

More recently Massias and Robin [MR96] showed that if n > 15985, then

p(n) < n (log n + log log n - 0.9427)

and if n > 13, then

p(n) < n (log n + log log n - 1 + 1.8 log log n / log n)

(which is better for large n). Pierre Dusart [Dusart99] made these results stronger and showed

p(n) > n (log n + log log n - 1)

for all n.  Dusart's article also gives better bounds getting even closer to the next term in the following well known asymptotic expansion for p_n.  The first terms of this asymptotic expansion were given by Cipolla [Cipolla1902] in 1902:

p(n) = n (log n + log log n - 1 + (log log (n) - 2)/log n -
                        ((log log (n))² - 6 log log (n) + 11)/(2 log² n) + O((log log n / log n)³))

Again Ribenboim95 and Riesel94 are excellent starting places to look up more information. By the way, if you are interested in the nth prime for small n (say less than 1,000,000,000), then use the nth prime page."

Consequence Three: The chance of a random integer x being prime is about 1/log x

Let x be a positive integer. Since about x/log x of the x positive integers less than or equal to x are prime, the probability of one of them being prime is about 1/log x.

Example: Suppose I want to find a 1000 digit prime.  If I am choosing 1000 digit integers x to test for primality at random, then I'd expect to test about log(10¹⁰⁰⁰) of them, or about 2302 integers before finding a prime.  Obviously if I used odd integers I could multiply this estimate by 1/2, and if I choose integers not divisible by 3, then I could multiply by 2/3,...

Another way to say this is that the density of primes less than x is about 1/log x.  Below is a graph of the actual density for small values of x.

   3. History of the Prime Number Theorem

In 1798 Legendre published the first significant conjecture on the size of pi(x), when in his book Essai sur la Théie des Nombres he stated

Legendre:

pi(x) is approximately x/(log x - 1.08366)

Clearly Legendre's conjecture is equivalent to the prime number theorem, the constant 1.08366 was based on his limited table for values of pi(x) (which only went to x = 400,000).  In the long run 1 is a better choice than Legendre's 1.08366.
Gauss was also studying prime tables and came up with a different estimate (perhaps first considered in 1791), communicated in a letter to Encke in 1849 and first published in 1863.

Gauss:

pi(x) is approximately Li(x) (the principal value of integral of 1/log u from u=0 to u=x).

Notice again that Gauss' conjecture is equivalent to the prime number theorem.  Let's compare these estimates:

Table 3. Comparisons of approximations to pi(x)

x	pi(x)	Gauss' Li	Legendre	x/(log x - 1)	R(x)
1000	168	178	172	169	168.4
10000	1229	1246	1231	1218	1226.9
100000	9592	9630	9588	9512	9587.4
1000000	78498	78628	78534	78030	78527.4
10000000	664579	664918	665138	661459	664667.4
100000000	5761455	5762209	5769341	5740304	5761551.9
1000000000	50847534	50849235	50917519	50701542	50847455.4
10000000000	455052511	455055614	455743004	454011971	455050683.3

In this table Gauss' Li(x) is always larger than pi(x), this is true for all small x > 2.  However in 1914 Littlewood proved that pi(x)-Li(x) assumes both positive and negative values infinitely often.  In 1986 Te Riele showed there are more than 10¹⁸⁰ successive integers x for which pi(x)>Li(x) between 6.62^.10³⁷⁰ and 6.69^.10³⁷⁰.
Tchebycheff made the first real progress toward a proof of the prime number theorem in 1850, showing there exist positive constants a < 1 < b such that

a(x/log x) < pi(x) < b(x/log x)

and that if pi(x)/(x/log x) had a limit, then its value must be one.  Sylvester in 1982 refined Tchebycheff's method and showed that we can use a = 0.95695 and b = 1.04423 if x is large enough.  (In 1962 it was shown that we can use a = 1 for all x> 10 [RS62].)
Finally, in 1896 Hadamard and independently de la Vallée Poussin completely proved the prime number theorem using Riemann's work relating pi(x) to the complex zeta function.  de la Vallée Poussin also proved that Gauss' Li(x) is a better approximation to pi(x) than x/(log x -a) no matter what value is assigned to the constant a (and also that the best value for a is 1).  A much better approximation than any of these is the Riemann function [Ribenboim91, Riesel94].
In 1949 Atle Selberg [Selberg49] and Paul Erdös [Erdös49] independently gave the first elementary proofs of the prime number theorem-- here elementary means not using modern complex analysis--in fact their proofs are very difficult!  An easier to read (but less elementary) proof is in Hardy and Wright's text [HW79 sect. 22.15-16].
Finally, when Hadamard and de la Vallée Poussin proved the Prime number theorem, they actually showed

for some positive constant a.  The error term depended on what was known about the zero-free region of the Riemann zeta function within the critical strip.  As our knowledge of the size of this region increases, the error term decreases.  In 1901 von Koch showed that the Riemann hypothesis is equivalent to the far tighter estimate: