Root prime gap

I recently found out about Andrica’s conjecture: the square roots of consecutive primes are less than 1 apart.

In symbols, Andrica’s conjecture says that if pn and pn+1 are consecutive prime numbers, then

pn+1 − √pn < 1.

This has been empirically verified for primes up to 2 × 1019.

If the conjecture is true, it puts an upper bound on how long you’d have to search to find the next prime:

pn+1 < 1 + 2√pn  + pn,

which would be an improvement on the Bertrand-Chebyshev theorem that says

pn+1 < 2pn.

 

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