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| The following 12 pages are scans of the introductory pages from Lehmer, D. N. List of Prime Numbers from 1 to 10,006,721. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1914. This introduction is a beautifully succinct summary of the state of prime number theory at the time of publication, and it still reads well almost a century later. |
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Scanned and spliced together with some difficulty are pages 1, 2 and 133 (the last) of the prime number tables from Lehmer's 1914 publication. Each image is a 1438 x 1026 greyscale GIF.
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table001.gif (623Kb), primes 1-48593 |
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table002.gif (606Kb), primes 48611-104723 |
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table133.gif (582Kb), primes 9925439-10006721 |
I wondered how difficult it would be to reproduce all 133 pages of Lehmer's prime number list using a modern PC. I wrote a small C# program (source is HERE) that generates simplified versions of Lehmer's pages as HTML files. Each HTML file contains a table with 5000 cells as 100 rows and 50 columns, in the same format as Lehmer's pages. The program takes about 1 minute to generate 133 pages on an old Pentium processor. I don't know how long it took to generate the book pages, but I guess it would have been a bit longer.
Note that the numbers in my tables are not in exactly the same format as Lehmer's. He truncated the leading digits of primes if they were redundant because you find them by reading back up a column. He probably did this to make the pages less dense and easier to read, although I find it rather irritating. My pages don't bother with this exact convention and I simply omit leading zeroes.
Also note that Lehmer listed 1 as the first prime, a convention of his that was not accepted in the mathematical community. I also list 1 as the first prime so that the tables correspond exactly to his pages. In 1975 when I first found the Lehmer book in the Monash Universtity Hargrave-Andrew Library I was thrilled to find my home phone number 7837703 on page 106, and it's still there!
Links to page files: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133