Abstract

Dedicated to Freeman Dyson, with best wishes on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Abstract. Contrary to what would be predicted on the basis of Cramér’s model concerning the distribution of prime numbers, we develop evidence that the distribution of ψ(x + H) − ψ(x), for 0 ≤ x ≤ N, is approximately normal with mean ∼ H and variance ∼ H log N/H, when N δ ≤ H ≤ N 1−δ. Cramér [4] modeled the distribution of prime numbers by independent random variables Xn (for n ≥ 3) that take the value 1 (n is “prime”) with probability 1 / logn and take the value 0 (n is “composite”) with probability 1 − 1 / log n. If pn denotes the n th prime

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