Definition:Stern Prime/Historical Note

Historical Note on Stern Prime

On reading about Goldbach's Lesser Conjecture in $1856$, Moritz Abraham Stern and his students tested all the primes to $9000$, and found the counterexamples $5777$ and $5993$.

He then went on to investigate odd numbers, and more specifically prime numbers, that cannot be represented in the form $2 a^2 + p$ where $a > 0$, thereby disallowing the trivial $2 \times 0^2 + p = p$.

Seeming to forget about $3$, he stated that the smallest such prime number was $17$.

The primes that he and his students found were named Stern primes by Laurent Hodges in his $1993$ paper which summarised the findings on this topic.

Sources

• 1856: Moritz A. Stern: Sur un assertion de Goldbach relative aux nombres impairs (Nouv. Ann. Math. Vol. 15: pp. 23 – 24)

• 1993: Laurent Hodges: A Lesser-Known Goldbach Conjecture (Math. Mag. Vol. 66: pp. 45 – 47)  www.jstor.org/stable/2690477