number theory Number theory (or arithmetic or higher arithmetic in older usage) is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and integer-valued functions. German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) said, "Mat ...

, a pernicious number is a positive integer such that the

Hamming weight The Hamming weight of a string is the number of symbols that are different from the zero-symbol of the alphabet used. It is thus equivalent to the Hamming distance from the all-zero string of the same length. For the most typical case, a string ...

of its

binary representation A binary number is a number expressed in the base-2 numeral system or binary numeral system, a method of mathematical expression which uses only two symbols: typically "0" (zero) and "1" (one). The base-2 numeral system is a positional notation ...

prime A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways ...

, that is, there is a prime number of 1's when it is written as a binary number.

Examples

The first pernicious number is 3, since 3 = 11₂ and 1 + 1 = 2, which is a prime. The next pernicious number is 5, since 5 = 101₂, followed by 6 (110₂), 7 (111₂) and 9 (1001₂). The sequence of pernicious numbers begins

Properties

No power of two is a pernicious number. This is trivially true, because powers of two in binary form are represented as a one followed by zeros. So each power of two has a Hamming weight of one, and one is not considered to be a prime. On the other hand, every number of the form

2^n+1

with

n>1

, including every

Fermat number In mathematics, a Fermat number, named after Pierre de Fermat, who first studied them, is a positive integer of the form :F_ = 2^ + 1, where ''n'' is a non-negative integer. The first few Fermat numbers are: : 3, 5, 17, 257, 65537, 42949672 ...

, is a pernicious number. This is because the sum of the digits in binary form is 2, which is a prime number. A

Mersenne number In mathematics, a Mersenne prime is a prime number that is one less than a power of two. That is, it is a prime number of the form for some integer . They are named after Marin Mersenne, a French Minim friar, who studied them in the early 17th ...

2^n-1

has a binary representation consisting of

n

ones, and is pernicious when

n

is prime. Every

Mersenne prime In mathematics, a Mersenne prime is a prime number that is one less than a power of two. That is, it is a prime number of the form for some integer . They are named after Marin Mersenne, a French Minim friar, who studied them in the early 17th ...

is a Mersenne number for prime

n

, and is therefore pernicious. By the

Euclid–Euler theorem The Euclid–Euler theorem is a theorem in number theory that relates perfect numbers to Mersenne primes. It states that an even number is perfect if and only if it has the form , where is a prime number. The theorem is named after mathematician ...

, the even

perfect number In number theory, a perfect number is a positive integer that is equal to the sum of its positive divisors, excluding the number itself. For instance, 6 has divisors 1, 2 and 3 (excluding itself), and 1 + 2 + 3 = 6, so 6 is a perfect number. ...

s take the form

2^(2^n-1)

for a Mersenne prime

2^n-1

; the binary representation of such a number consists of a prime number

n

of ones, followed by

n-1

zeros. Therefore, every even perfect number is pernicious.

Related numbers

* Odious numbers are numbers with an odd number of 1s in their binary expansion (). * Evil numbers are numbers with an even number of 1s in their binary expansion ().

References

{{Classes of natural numbers , state=collapsed Base-dependent integer sequences