Generalized Fermat Divisors (base=6)

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.

(up) Definitions and Notes

The numbers Fb,n = b^2^n+1 (with b an integer greater than one) are called the generalized Fermat numbers. (In the Prime database they are denoted GF(b,n) to avoid the use of subscripts.) It is reasonable to conjecture that for each base b, there are only finitely many such primes.

As in the case of the Fermat numbers, many have interested in the form and distribution of the divisors of these numbers. When b is even, each of their divisors must have the form

k.2m+1
with k odd and m>n. For this reason, when we find a large prime of the form k.2n+1 (with k small), we usually check to see if it divides a Fermat number. For example, Gallot's Win95 program Proth.exe has this test built in for a few choices of b.

The number k.2n+1 (k odd) will divide some generalized Fermat number for roughly 1/k of the bases b.

(up) Record Primes of this Type

(up) References

BR98
A. Björn and H. Riesel, "Factors of generalized Fermat numbers," Math. Comp., 67 (1998) 441--446.  MR 98e:11008 (Abstract available)
DK95
H. Dubner and W. Keller, "Factors of generalized Fermat numbers," Math. Comp., 64 (1995) 397--405.  MR 95c:11010
RB94
H. Riesel and A. Börn, Generalized Fermat numbers.  In "Mathematics of Computation 1943-1993: A Half-Century of Computational Mathematics," W. Gautschi editor, Proc. Symp. Appl. Math. Vol, 48, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 1994.  pp. 583-587, MR 95j:11006
Riesel69
H. Riesel, "Some factors of the numbers Gn = 62n + 1 and Hn = 102n + 1," Math. Comp., 23:106 (1969) 413--415.  MR 39:6813
Riesel69b
H. Riesel, "Common prime factors of the numbers An =a2n+1," BIT, 9 (1969) 264-269.  MR 41:3381
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