MathOverflow will be down for maintenance for approximately 3 hours, starting Monday evening (06/24/2013) at approximately 9:00 PM Eastern time (UTC-4).

4 fixed grammar

Note: This is an update formulation since many people misunderstood the question before.

Of course it is easy to make a statement like "Every n is a prime or at most 1000", which is true for every prime $n$ and every small $n$ but fails for $n=1002$. What are "real" conjectures that were known to hold for primes and small values, then turned out to be false?

An excellent example about cyclotomic polynomials was given by Aaron in the comments. Here the conjecture was that the coefficients are $0, \pm 1$ for every $n$. This holds for primes are and small $n$'s, but fails for $105$.

Also the existence of Carmichael numbers comes close, but here the problem itself involves primes, I would like something less "primey". I know conjuctures that are or were known only for primes. Recently solved is Colorful Tverberg, still unknown is Evasiveness or this little MO problem.

3 updated

# ArethereWhatare conjectures that are true for primes but failedthenturnedouttobefalseforsomecompositenumber?

Note: This is an update formulation since many people misunderstood the question before.

Of course it is easy to make a statement like "Every n is a prime or at most 1000", which is true for every prime $n$ and every small $n$ but fails for $n=1002$. What are there any "real" conjectures that were known to hold for primes and small values, then turned out to be false?

For

An excellent example about cyclotomic polynomials was given by Aaron in the comments. Here the conjecture was that the coefficients are $0, \pm 1$ for every $n$. This holds for primes are small $n$'s, but fails for $105$.

Also the existence of Carmichael numbers comes close, but here the problem itself involves primes, I would like something less "primey". I know conjuctures that are or were known only for primes. Recently solved is Colorful Tverberg, still unknown is Evasiveness or this little MO problem.

2 removed tags
1