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Alternatively, an integer sequence may be defined by a property which members of the sequence possess and other integers do not possess. For example, we can determine whether a given integer is a perfect number, (sequence A000396 in the OEIS), even though we do not have a formula for the nth perfect number.
For instance, the sequence 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, . . . is an arithmetic progression with a common difference of 2. If the initial term of an arithmetic progression is and the common difference of successive members is , then the -th term of the sequence is given by
Because the set of primes is a computably enumerable set, by Matiyasevich's theorem, it can be obtained from a system of Diophantine equations. Jones et al. (1976) found an explicit set of 14 Diophantine equations in 26 variables, such that a given number k + 2 is prime if and only if that system has a solution in nonnegative integers: [7]
In mathematics, a recurrence relation is an equation according to which the th term of a sequence of numbers is equal to some combination of the previous terms. Often, only previous terms of the sequence appear in the equation, for a parameter that is independent of ; this number is called the order of the relation.
An example is the sequence of primes (3, 7, 11), which is given by = + for . According to the Green–Tao theorem, there exist arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions in the sequence of primes. Sometimes the phrase may also be used about primes which belong to an arithmetic progression which also contains composite numbers.
A geometric progression, also known as a geometric sequence, is a mathematical sequence of non-zero numbers where each term after the first is found by multiplying the previous one by a fixed number called the common ratio. For example, the sequence 2, 6, 18, 54, ... is a geometric progression with a common ratio of 3.
Informally, a sequence has a limit if the elements of the sequence become closer and closer to some value (called the limit of the sequence), and they become and remain arbitrarily close to , meaning that given a real number greater than zero, all but a finite number of the elements of the sequence have a distance from less than .
This striking formula is one of the so-called explicit formulas of number theory, and is already suggestive of the result we wish to prove, since the term x (claimed to be the correct asymptotic order of ψ(x)) appears on the right-hand side, followed by (presumably) lower-order asymptotic terms.