- #1
Jakovenko
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Homework Statement
Prove the following statement:
Every integer can be written as the sum of a prime number and an integer squared. Negative primes are allowed.
For example:
1 = (-3) + 2^2
2 = (-2) + 2^2
3 = 2 + 1^2
4 = (-5) + 3^2
5 = (-11) + 4^2
6 = 5 + 1^2
7 = 3 + 2^2
8 = 7 + 1^2
9 = 5 + 2^2
10 = (-71) + 9^2
11 = 7 + 2^2
And so forth...
The Attempt at a Solution
I naively tried to directly prove this by contradiction...but after some headshaking, there's no clear way to me to disprove the claim that this is false.
So...I puttered around and extended the examples list to the first 50 integers, but there's no clear pattern whatsoever.
Induction now seems the obvious way of proving this, but even though the statement is true for the first 50 integers, I have no idea how to show that this is true for the nth integer.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
(Semi-random side note: for people who recognize this, its pretty similar to Goldbach's conjecture, but hopefully this one is provable)