Everest, Graham; Stevens, Shaun; Tamsett, Duncan; Ward, Thomas B. Primes generated by recurrence sequences. (English) Zbl 1246.11026 Am. Math. Mon. 114, No. 5, 417-431 (2007). Summary: The notorious “Mersenne prime problem,” which asks if infinitely many terms of the sequence \(1,3,7,15,31,63,\dots\) are prime, remains open. However, a closely related problem has a complete answer. Beyond the term 63, every number in the sequence has a primitive divisor (that is, a prime factor that does not divide any earlier term). We investigate the appearance of primitive divisors in sequences defined by quadratic polynomials, finding asymptotic estimates for the number of terms with primitive divisors. Along the way, we discuss how mathematicians use a mixture of heuristic and rigorous arguments to inform their expectations about prime appearance and primitive divisors in several natural recurrence sequences. Cited in 2 ReviewsCited in 8 Documents MSC: 11B37 Recurrences 11A41 Primes PDFBibTeX XMLCite \textit{G. Everest} et al., Am. Math. Mon. 114, No. 5, 417--431 (2007; Zbl 1246.11026) Full Text: DOI arXiv Link Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences: List of primitive prime divisors of the numbers (4^n-1)/3 (A002450) in their order of occurrence. Number of biased numbers (A101550) less than 10^n.