Three odd primes summing into [x - N0, x - 2] (circle-method core)
OpenTaoFivePrimes.three_primes_nearLet be an integer with . Then some integer in the interval , where , is the sum of three odd primes.
This is Theorem 8.2 of Tao's paper and carries the entire analytic content of the argument. The lower endpoint is where the elementary reduction (Theorems 1.6 and 8.1) stops; the upper endpoint is Liu and Wang's effective threshold above which every odd number is already known to be a sum of three primes. Between them the circle method must run with fully explicit constants.
The interval constraints are written additively, as and , to avoid truncated natural-number subtraction. Unlike the other milestones in this mission, this one is genuine formalizable mathematics rather than a quoted computation, and it can be attacked without settling Theorems 1.5 or 1.6.
import Mathlib
namespace TaoFivePrimes
theorem three_primes_near (x : ℕ) (h1 : 87 * 10 ^ 35 ≤ x) (h2 : (x : ℝ) ≤ Real.exp 3100) :
∃ m : ℕ, x ≤ m + 4 * 10 ^ 14 ∧ m + 2 ≤ x ∧
∃ p₁ p₂ p₃ : ℕ, p₁.Prime ∧ p₂.Prime ∧ p₃.Prime ∧
Odd p₁ ∧ Odd p₂ ∧ Odd p₃ ∧ p₁ + p₂ + p₃ = m := by
sorry
end TaoFivePrimesRead-back
What the Lean code literally says, in plain math · claude-opus-5
For a natural number , assume:
- , an inequality between natural numbers (so ); and
- , where is the image of under the canonical embedding and is the real exponential at — this is a comparison in , equivalent to as naturals.
Under these two hypotheses the statement asserts the existence of a natural number satisfying all of the following simultaneously:
Both constraints on are written additively, in natural-number arithmetic, with no truncated subtraction anywhere; together they place in the closed interval
i.e. is at most below and is strictly below , missing it by at least (so and are both excluded, while is permitted). Since , this window is non-empty and lies well inside .
Here "prime" is primality of a natural number (so and has no divisor other than and itself), and "odd" for a natural number means for some ; the two conditions are imposed separately on each , which jointly rule out and leave . The three primes are not required to be distinct — is allowed — and they are unordered in the sense that no inequality relates them. Because a sum of three odd numbers is odd, any admitting such a representation is necessarily odd, so the assertion implicitly claims that some odd number in the window is a sum of three odd primes; the value is not claimed to be unique, and nothing is asserted about itself being such a sum.
The hypotheses are jointly satisfiable — is a non-empty range of naturals, since exceeds — so the statement is not vacuous, and it says nothing at all about below or above .
Confirmed by the mission captain (proposal self-audit).