Prime numbers | Rational numbers
Reciprocals of primes
The reciprocals of prime numbers have been of interest to mathematicians for various reasons. They do not have a finite sum, as Leonhard Euler proved in 1737. Like all rational numbers, the reciprocals of primes have repeating decimal representations. In his later years, George Salmon (1819–1904) concerned himself with the repeating periods of these decimal representations of reciprocals of primes. Contemporaneously, William Shanks (1812–1882) calculated numerous reciprocals of primes and their repeating periods, and published two papers "On Periods in the Reciprocals of Primes" in 1873 and 1874. In 1874 he also published a table of primes, and the periods of their reciprocals, up to 20,000 (with help from and "communicated by the Rev. George Salmon"), and pointed out the errors in previous tables by three other authors. Rules for calculating the periods of repeating decimals from rational fractions were given by James Whitbread Lee Glaisher in 1878. For a prime p, the period of its reciprocal will be equal to or will divide p − 1. The sequence of recurrence periods of the reciprocal primes (sequence in the OEIS) appears in the 1973 Handbook of Integer Sequences. (Wikipedia).
