Age of twin prime conjecture

[Timothy Y. Chow]

A while ago someone was looking for the oldest unsolved math problem. I
think the consensus was the existence of odd perfects. However, I just
read in _Mathematical_Cranks_ by Underwood Dudley (sp?) that the twin prime
conjecture goes back to Euclid. He doesn't give an explicit citation
though. Can anyone confirm this?
--
Tim Chow tyc...@math.mit.edu
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs
30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh
only 1 1/2 tons. ---Popular Mechanics, March 1949

[William C Waterhouse]

In article 9...@galois.mit.edu, tyc...@math.mit.edu (Timothy Y. Chow) writes:
> A while ago someone was looking for the oldest unsolved math problem. I
> think the consensus was the existence of odd perfects. However, I just
> read in _Mathematical_Cranks_ by Underwood Dudley (sp?) that the twin prime
> conjecture goes back to Euclid. He doesn't give an explicit citation
> though. Can anyone confirm this?

The statement in Dudley is not his own; it's in a newspaper
article he reproduces. Obviously the question might come up
at any time, once it was known that there were infinitely many
primes (that's what the reference to Euclid should say).
I'm fairly sure that there are no references to the question surviving
from antiquity. The first result proved was, I think,
by Viggo Brun early in this century; perhaps someone can track
down his paper and see whether he has references to any earlier
mention of the question.

William C. Waterhouse
Penn State