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 just over a century later. Click the thumbnails to open the full-sized images.
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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.jpg (623Kb), primes 1–48593 |
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table002.jpg (606Kb), primes 48611–104723 |
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table133.jpg (582Kb), primes 9925439–10006721 |
Updated (Feb-2015)
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 that generates simplified versions of Lehmer's pages as HTML files. The full source code and project can be found in this Azure DevOps Repository. Each HTML file contains a table with 5000 cells as 100 rows and 50 columns, using the same layout as Lehmer's pages. The program takes about 6 seconds to generate the 133 pages on a 2020 vintage PC. I wonder how long it took Lehmer to generate his book pages.
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 after the first row.
Also note that Lehmer listed 1 as the first prime, a convention of his that was never accepted by the mathematical community. I therefore also list 1 as the first prime so that the generated pages correspond exactly to his printed pages. In 1975 when I first found the Lehmer book in the Monash University Hargrave-Andrew Library I was thrilled to find my old 1970s home phone number 7837703 on page 106.
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
Note (Dec-2015)
I accidentally found the following link to a PDF by Denis Rogel, who had the same idea as me and generated a PDF reconstruction of the tables back in October 2011.