OFFSET
1,1
COMMENTS
"Length" means total number of terms including endpoints, minus 1.
Woods was the first to find such numbers, Dowe proved there are infinitely many and Cégielski, Heroult and Richard showed that the set is recursive.
This seems to coincide with prime partitionable numbers in sense of Holsztynski & Strube: n such that there is a partition {P1,P2} of the primes less than n such that for any composition n1+n2=n, there is (p1,p2) in P1 x P2 such that p1|n1 or p2|n2. - M. F. Hasler, Jun 29 2014; there is now a proof for this (see Gribble link), Dec 17 2014
In popular culture: this sequence was involved in the encryption of a message in Episode "eps2.9_pyth0n-pt1.p7z" of the "Mr. Robot" TV series (first aired Sep 14 2016). - Jessica K. Sklar, Jan 30 2019
Named after the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős (1913-1996) and the Australian mathematician Alan Robert Woods (1953-2011). - Amiram Eldar, Jun 20 2021
REFERENCES
Richard K. Guy, Unsolved Problems in Number Theory, 1981, related to Sections B27, B28, B29.
Konstantin Lakkis, Number Theory [in Greek], Revised edition, 1984.
LINKS
Patrick Cégielski, François Heroult and Denis Richard, On the amplitude of intervals of natural numbers whose every element has a common prime divisor with at least an extremity, Theor. Comp. Sci., Vol. 303, No. 1 (2003), pp. 53-62.
David L. Dowe, On the existence of sequences of co-prime pairs of integers, J. Austral. Math. Soc. Ser. A, Vol. 47, No. 1 (1989), pp. 84-89.
Paul Erdős and John L. Selfridge, Complete prime subsets of consecutive integers, Proceedings of the Manitoba Conference on Numerical Mathematics, 1971, pp. 1-14.
Bertram Felgenhauer, Some OEIS computations (includes the terms of this sequence up to 100000).
James Grime and Brady Haran, Erdős-Woods Numbers, Numberphile video (2024)
M. F. Hasler and R. J. Mathar, Corrigendum to "Paths and circuits in finite groups", Discr. Math. 22 (1978) 263, arXiv:1510.07997 [math.NT], 2015.
Christopher Hunt Gribble, Seqfan thread, Dec 05 2014.
W. Holsztynski and R. F. E. Strube, Paths and circuits in finite groups, Discr. Math. 22 (1978) 263-272.
Internet Movie Database, Mr. Robot: Season 2, Episode 11: eps2.9_pyth0n-pt1.p7z
Nik Lygeros, Erdos-Woods Numbers, contains a list for a(n)<=400000. [Warning: a lot of terms are missing. The smallest missing term is a(169) = 796. - Jianing Song, Mar 08 2021]
William T. Trotter, Jr. and Paul Erdős, When the Cartesian product of directed cycles is Hamiltonian, J. Graph Theory, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1978), pp. 137-142.
Wikipedia, Erdős-Woods number.
Alan Robert Woods, Some Problems in Logic and Number Theory, and their Connections, Thesis, University of Manchester, 1981 (reprinted in New Studies in Weak Arithmetics, Sept 2013, CSLI). [Cached copy at the Wayback Machine]
EXAMPLE
a(1) = 16 refers to the interval 2184, 2185, ..., 2200. The end points are 2184 = 2^3 *3 *7 *13 and 2200 = 2^3 *5^2 *11, and each number 2184<=k<=2200 has at least one prime factor in the set {2,3,5,7,11,13}.
PROG
(PARI) prime_part(n)=my(P=primes(primepi(n-1))); forstep(x1=2, 2^#P-1, 2, P1=vecextract(P, x1); P2=setminus(P, P1); for(n1=1, n-1, bittest(n-n1, 0) || next; setintersect(P1, factor(n1)[, 1]~) || setintersect(P2, factor(n-n1)[, 1]~) || next(2)); return([P1, P2])) \\ M. F. Hasler, Jun 29 2014
CROSSREFS
KEYWORD
nonn
AUTHOR
Nik Lygeros (webmaster(AT)lygeros.org), Feb 12 2001
EXTENSIONS
Further terms from Victor S. Miller, Sep 29 2005
STATUS
approved