login

Year-end appeal: Please make a donation to the OEIS Foundation to support ongoing development and maintenance of the OEIS. We are now in our 61st year, we have over 378,000 sequences, and we’ve reached 11,000 citations (which often say “discovered thanks to the OEIS”).

A073825
Numbers n such that Sum_{k=1..n} k^k is prime.
5
2, 5, 6, 10, 30
OFFSET
1,1
COMMENTS
Any additional terms are greater than 1320 with the next prime having more than 4120 digits.
No terms out to 3000. The next term would yield a prime with over 10000 digits. - John Sillcox (johnsillcox(AT)hotmail.com), Aug 05 2003
For every n, a(n) must be equal to 1 or 2 (mod 4) because Sum[k^k,{k,a(n)}] must be odd. Any additional terms are greater than 5368 with the next prime having more than 20025 digits. - Farideh Firoozbakht, Aug 09 2003
Soundararajan finds an asymptotic upper bound of log k / log log k prime numbers of the form 1^1 + 2^2 + ... + n^n less than k; that is, n << log a(n) / log log a(n). - Charles R Greathouse IV, Aug 27 2008
According to Andersen, the next term is larger than 28000, see Rivera link. - M. F. Hasler, Mar 01 2009
Conjecture: This sequence is infinite. - Daniel Hoying, Jul 20 2020
LINKS
Carlos Rivera, Puzzle 404. Sigma(x^x), for x=1 to n, The Prime Puzzles & Problems Connection.
K. Soundararajan, Primes in a Sparse Sequence, Journal of Number Theory 43:2 (1993), pp. 220-227.
FORMULA
log a(n) >> n log^2 n. - Charles R Greathouse IV, May 17 2016
MATHEMATICA
v={}; Do[If[(Mod[n, 4]==1||Mod[n, 4]==2)&&PrimeQ[Sum[k^k, {k, n}]], v=Insert[v, n, -1]; Print[v]], {n, 5368}]
PROG
(PARI) s=0; for(k=1, 1320, s=s+k^k; if(isprime(s), print1(k, ", ")))
CROSSREFS
Cf. A073826 (corresponding primes), A001923 (Sum k^k, k=1..n).
Sequence in context: A056643 A057256 A236248 * A015891 A238146 A160645
KEYWORD
nonn
AUTHOR
Rick L. Shepherd, Aug 13 2002
EXTENSIONS
Edited by Charles R Greathouse IV, Oct 27 2010
STATUS
approved