JonahSinick comments on The Use of Many Independent Lines of Evidence: The Basel Problem - Less Wrong

22 Post author: JonahSinick 03 June 2013 04:42AM

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Comment author: JonahSinick 03 June 2013 04:04:46PM *  3 points [-]

Yes, this is right.

The case of Mertens' conjecture is interesting in that surface level heuristic considerations suggest that it's not true. In particular, it violates the heuristic that I described here.

Roughly speaking, the function "the difference between the number of natural numbers up to k with an odd number of prime factors and the number of natural numbers up to k with an even number of prime factors" is supposed to be normally distributed with standard deviation 'square root of k,' and Merten's conjecture predicts a truncated normal distribution.