[Math] Do Arithmetic Mean and Geometric Mean of Prime Numbers converge

elementary-number-theorynumber theoryprime numbers

I was looking at a list of primes. I noticed that $ \frac{AM (p_1, p_2, \ldots, p_n)}{p_n}$ seemed to converge.

This led me to try $ \frac{GM (p_1, p_2, \ldots, p_n)}{p_n}$ which also seemed to converge.

I did a quick Excel graph and regression and found the former seemed to converge to $\frac{1}{2}$ and latter to $\frac{1}{e}$. As with anything related to primes, no easy reasoning seemed to point to those results (however, for all natural numbers it was trivial to show that the former asymptotically tended to $\frac{1}{2}$).

Are these observations correct and are there any proofs towards:

$$
{
\lim_{n\to\infty} \left( \frac{AM (p_1, p_2, \ldots, p_n)}{p_n} \right)
= \frac{1}{2} \tag1
}
$$

$$
{
\lim_{n\to\infty} \left( \frac{GM (p_1, p_2, \ldots, p_n)}{p_n} \right)
= \frac{1}{e} \tag2
}
$$

Also, does the limit $$
{
\lim_{n\to\infty} \left( \frac{HM (p_1, p_2, \ldots, p_n)}{p_n} \right) \tag3
}
$$ exist?

Best Answer

Your conjecture for GM was proved in 2011 in the short paper On a limit involving the product of prime numbers by József Sándor and Antoine Verroken.

Abstract. Let $p_k$ denote the $k$th prime number. The aim of this note is to prove that the limit of the sequence $(p_n / \sqrt[n]{p_1 \cdots p_n})$ is $e$.

The authors obtain the result based on the prime number theorem, i.e., $$p_n \approx n \log n \quad \textrm{as} \ n \to \infty$$ as well as an inequality with Chebyshev's function $$\theta(x) = \sum_{p \le x}\log p$$ where $p$ are primes less than $x$.