The reciprocal of every prime p (other than two and
five) has a period, that is the decimal expansion of
1/p repeats in blocks of some set length (see the
period of a decimal expansion). This is called the period of
the prime p. Samuel Yates defined a unique prime
(or unique period prime) to be a prime which has a
period that it shares with no other prime. For example: 3,
11, 37, and 101 are the only primes with periods one, two,
three, and four respectively--so they are unique primes.
But 41 and 271 both have period five, 7 and 13 both have
period six, 239 and 4649 both have period seven, and each
of 353, 449, 641, 1409, and 69857 have period thirty-two,
showing that these primes are not unique primes.
As we would expect from any object labeled "unique," unique primes are extremely rare. For example, even though there are over 1047 primes below 1050, only eighteen of these primes are unique primes (all listed in the table below). We can find the unique primes using the following theorem.
Related pages (outside of this work)