My paper, "Proof of Two Conjectures of Andrica and Bagdasar" has appeared in the journal Integers. It uses techniques from my earlier work to show that certain families of pseudoprimes are infinite. I hope that others find this technique useful.
Friday, November 19, 2021
Thursday, November 18, 2021
Preprint of "Finding a Widely Digitally Delicate Prime" available on the math arXiv
In September, I posted a preprint of "Finding a Widely Digitally Delicate Prime" on the math arXiv. It may not end up published in this form, but because it described the only known example of such a prime, and how I found it, I wanted to have it documented.
Friday, September 03, 2021
"Ternary and Quaternary Curves of Small Fixed Genus and Gonality With Many Rational Points" Appears Online in Experimental Mathematics
My paper with Xander Faber, "Ternary and Quaternary Curves of Small Fixed Genus and Gonality With Many Rational Points," has appeared in Experimental Mathematics online. Based on my estimate of the journal's backlog, I expect print publication in 2023.
"The abc Conjecture Implies That Only Finitely Many s-Cullen Numbers Are Repunits" Appears in the Journal of Integer Sequences
This is my ninth journal article published.
Preprint of "On Integers Whose Sum is the Reverse of their Product" available on the arXiv
Have you ever noticed that 9+9=18, while 9x9=81, which is 18 backwards? My co-author's kids did. The question of what other pairs of numbers a and b have a+b equal to axb backwards led us to write this paper. We give a technique for solving it in all bases. We have seen a list of these numbers in base 10 on the web, but we are aware of no other proof.
Monday, February 08, 2021
"A recent conjecture by Faber-Grantham"
What's even better than writing a paper? Having someone else write one answering a question you asked. In "Ternary and Quaternary Curves of Small Fixed Genus and Gonality with Many Rational Points," Xander Faber and I conjectured:
In a recent preprint, Floris Vermeulen proved this conjecture.
Monday, October 19, 2020
Wednesday, September 23, 2020
Video of "An Unconditional Improvement to the Running Time of the Quadratic Frobenius Test"
A video of my talk on "An Unconditional Improvement to the Running Time of the Quadratic Frobenius Test" at the recent PAJAMAS conference is available on YouTube.
Since I am likely to have more talks available online in the future, I have created a talks page listing them all (at this moment, listing them both).
While I was at it, I created a papers page as well. My previous one had not been updated since 2014, and did not have great links. This one links to both the arXiv copies and the journals (for those which have been published).
Wednesday, September 09, 2020
Preprint of "The abc Conjecture Implies That Only Finitely Many Cullen Numbers Are Repunits" on the arXiv
A preprint of "The abc Conjecture Implies That Only Finitely Many Cullen Numbers Are Repunits" is now available on the math arXiv. In it, Hester Graves and I show that if you assume the abc Conjecture, you can show that finitely many Cullen numbers are repunits to any base. (Sort of like it says in the title.)
Frequently Asked Questions (or so I imagine):
- What is the abc conjecture? It says that if you have integers a, b, and c with a+b=c, the product of all primes dividing a, b and c is almost never much smaller than c. For more, you can read the Wikipedia article.
- What are Cullen numbers? Cullen numbers are numbers of the form n2n+1, for a positive integer n.
- What are repunits? They are numbers all of whose digits are 1. So 111 or 1111. But! Those are base-10, and in this paper, we consider any base, so 7 is a repunit, because it is 111 in base 2. 2801 is a repunit, because it is 1111 in base 7. We don't allow 11, because every number has a base where it's 11.
- Does your result hold for s-Cullen numbers? Yes. For any given s, there are finitely many s-Cullen numbers that are repunits (assuming the abc conjecture).
- What are s-Cullen numbers? Numbers of the form nsn+1.
- When did you start using the abc conjecture? Just now! Hester had this cool idea, and it was fun to see how it worked out.
Wednesday, September 02, 2020
Video of "Binary and Ternary Curves of Fixed Genus and Gonality with Many Points"
Wednesday, June 03, 2020
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Preprint of "Binary Curves of small fixed genus and gonality with many rational points" on arXiv
Sunday, May 10, 2020
"Brazilian Primes Which Are Also Sophie Germain Primes" Appears in Integers
Monday, May 04, 2020
"Binary Curves of Fixed Genus and Gonality with Many Points" at West Coast Number Theory 2019
Monday, March 16, 2020
"An Unconditional Improvement to the Running Time of the Quadratic Frobenius Test" appears in Journal of Number Theory
Grantham, Jon. An unconditional improvement to the running time of the quadratic Frobenius test. J. Number Theory 210 (2020), 476--480.
Sunday, September 15, 2019
Preprint of "An Unconditional Improvement to the Running Time of the Quadratic Frobenius Test"
Wednesday, September 04, 2019
Further results on "Grantham's Problem"
A decade ago, I mentioned that someone had addressed a question I asked in a 2001 paper, which he called "Grantham's problem."
Now he and two authors have pushed the computations further, in the paper "Quadratic Frobenius pseudoprimes with respect to x2 + 5x + 5".
The results put conditions on a pseudoprime with two prime factors. The known heuristics for the existence of pseudoprimes give ones with many prime factors, so it is not surprising, but it is good to see this evidence.
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
Saturday, April 13, 2019
Talk on Brazilian Primes at SERMON 2019
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
Moving to the arXiv
Times have changed, however, and arXiv.org seems like a more permanent repository for the reprints than pseudoprime.com. And, frankly, more permanent than some of the journal web sites.
So you can now see all of my reprints (and preprint!) at this arXiv link.







