Suffix primes

MathUpdate tweeted this afternoon that

Any number made by removing the first n digits of 646216567629137 is still prime.

and links to sequence A012885 in the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS). The OEIS heading for the sequence is

Suffixes of 357686312646216567629137 (all primes)

which implies you can start with an even larger number, cutting off the first digit each time and producing a sequence of primes.

The following Python code verifies that this is indeed the case.

    from sympy.ntheory import isprime

    x = "357686312646216567629137"

    while x:
        print isprime(int(x))
        x = x[1:]

Update: lucio wrote a program to show that the prime given here is the longest one with the suffix property.

    def extend_prime(n, result):
        for i in range(10):
            nn = int(str(i) + str(n))
            if nn == n: continue
            if isprime(nn):
                result.append(nn)
                extend_prime(nn, result)
        return result        

    print "Max Prefix Prime:", max(extend_prime("", []))

One minor suggestion: by using range(1, 10) rather than range(10) above, i.e. eliminating 0, the line if nn == n: continue could be eliminated.

Instead of calling max, you could call len to find that there are 4260 suffix primes.

Here’s a list of all suffix primes created by the code above and sorting the output.

Other novelty primes:

Narcissus prime Sonnet primes Limerick primes Prime telephone numbers Prime words