You need to know: Prime numbers
Background: Any positive integer can be written in a unique way as
, where
is an integer, and
are integers between
and
. This is called decimal expansion of n with digits
, and this is the usual way we write integers.
The Theorem: On 4th April 2016, James Maynard submitted to arxiv a paper in which he proved that given any digit , there are exist infinitely many primes p which do not have the digit d in their decimal expansion.
Short context: For , let
be the set of positive integers which do not have the digit d in their decimal expansion. For
, there are about
integers less than x in
. Sets of integers with at most
integers up to x for some
are called sparse. Usually, it is hard to prove that there are infinitely many primes in sparse sets. The Theorem achieves this for sets
,
. See here for a result about infinitely many primes in (somewhat similar but not sparse) sets of integers with even/odd sum of digits.
Links: Free arxiv version of the original paper is here, journal version is here.