The Top Twenty--a Prime Page Collection

Unique

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The Prime Pages

The Prime Pages keeps a list of the 5000 largest known primes, plus a few each of certain selected archivable forms and classes. These forms are defined in this collection's home page. This page is about one of those forms. Comments and suggestions requested.

(up) Definitions and Notes

The reciprocal of every prime p (other than two and five) has a period, that is the decimal expansion of 1/p repeats in blocks of some set length (see the period of a decimal expansion). This is called the period of the prime p. Samuel Yates defined a unique prime (or unique period prime) to be a prime which has a period that it shares with no other prime. For example: 3, 11, 37, and 101 are the only primes with periods one, two, three, and four respectively--so they are unique primes. But 41 and 271 both have period five, 7 and 13 both have period six, 239 and 4649 both have period seven, and each of 353, 449, 641, 1409, and 69857 have period thirty-two, showing that these primes are not unique primes.

As we would expect from any object labeled "unique," unique primes are extremely rare. For example, even though there are over 1047 primes below 1050, only eighteen of these primes are unique primes. We can find the unique primes using the following theorem.

Theorem.
The prime p is a unique prime of period n if and only if
is a power of p where is the nth cyclotomic polynomial.

(up) Record Primes of this Type

rankprime digitswhowhencomment
1Phi(427, -1028) 10081 FE9 May 2009 Unique, ECPP
2Phi(4029, -1000) 7488 c47 Aug 2009 Unique, ECPP
3Phi(9455, -10) 7200 c33 Jul 2005 Unique, ECPP
4Phi(1479, -100000000) 7168 c47 Oct 2009 Unique, ECPP
5Phi(2405, -10000) 6912 c47 Apr 2009 Unique, ECPP
6Phi(10887, 10) 6841 c33 May 2005 Unique, ECPP
7Phi(7357, -10) 6301 c33 May 2004 Unique, ECPP
8Phi(6437, 10) 6240 c47 Nov 2008 Unique, ECPP
9Phi(6685, -10) 4560 c8 Mar 2003 Unique, ECPP
10Phi(3273, -100) 4361 c8 Apr 2003 Unique, ECPP
11Phi(1087, -10000) 4344 c8 Nov 2002 Unique, ECPP
12Phi(483, -1016) 4224 c8 Dec 2002 Unique, ECPP
13Phi(1959, 1000) 3912 c8 Sep 2002 Unique, ECPP
14Phi(955, -100000) 3801 c8 Aug 2002 Unique, ECPP
15Phi(6135, 10) 3265 c8 Aug 2001 Unique, ECPP
16Phi(3341, -10) 3073 c8 Nov 2001 Unique, ECPP
17Phi(3011, -10) 3010 F2 Apr 2001 Unique, APR-CL assisted
18Phi(3903, 10) 2600 p44 Feb 2001 Unique
19Phi(3261, -10) 2173 F2 Feb 2001 Unique, APR-CL assisted
20Phi(2137, -10) 2136 c6 Dec 2000 Unique, ECPP

(up) References

Caldwell97
C. Caldwell, "Unique (period) primes and the factorization of cyclotomic polynomial minus one," Mathematica Japonica, 46:1 (1997) 189--195.  MR 99b:11139 (Abstract available)
CD1998
C. Caldwell and H. Dubner, "Unique period primes," J. Recreational Math., 29:1 (1998) 43--48.
Yates1980
S. Yates, "Periods of unique primes," Math. Mag., 53:5 (1980) 314.
Chris Caldwell © 1996-2009 (all rights reserved)