This is the homepage of my Part III course called Prime Numbers, lectured in Michaelmas 2004. It followed Davenport's book rather closely. Subsequent attempts to lecture on this material in 2007 and 2012 should prove more interesting to would-be readers.

Classical

[Big_O] The Big-O and other important notation
[PN1] Introducing the Riemann zeta-function
[PN2] Integral functions of order one
[Gamma] A primer on the Gamma function
[PN3] More on zeta
[PN4] Perron's formula and the explicit formula
[PN5] The zero-free region and the prime number theorem
[PN6] Dirichlet characters
[PN7] Basic properties of Dirichlet L-functions
[PN8] Zero-free regions for Dirichlet L-functions, I
[PN9] Zero-free regions for Dirichlet L-functions, II
[PN10] The Siegel-Walfisz Theorem

Topics

[PN11] The Large Sieve
[PN12] The Selberg sieve applied to twin primes

These notes on the Selberg sieve were cribbed from some notes that I wrote about 4 years ago. These contain somewhat more material, which may be of interest to some of you.

In the last four lectures we proved Vinogradov's three primes theorem following Gowers. The notes (by Gowers) for this section of the course are here. Some of the notation is slightly different, and Lemmas 17,18 and Corollary 19 were not lectured and are not examinable.

Example Sheets

Examples 1
Examples 2


Internet Resources

Noam Elkies has twice given a course at Harvard on analytic number theory. His excellent notes cover most of our material and rather more.

An article on the Riemann hypothesis by Brian Conrey, in the Notices of the AMS.

Brief online notes on the Riemann hypothesis from the American Institute of Mathematics.