It is well-known that
A: The series of the reciprocals of the primes diverges
My question is whether property A is in some sense a truth strongly tied to the nature of the prime numbers.
Property A tells us that the primes are a rather fat subset of $\mathbb{N}$. Is there a way to define a topology on $\mathbb{N}$ such that every dense subset of $\mathbb{N}$ (under this topology) corresponds to a fat subset of the natural numbers?
What do you think about this?
Yes, it's possible. Define the closed sets to be the sets the sum of whose reciprocals converges, together with $\mathbb{N}$. This collection of subsets is closed under arbitrary intersection and finite union, so it does form the closed sets of a topology.
A subset of $\mathbb{N}$ is dense in this topology if its closure is $\mathbb{N}$, in other words, if it is not contained in any smaller closed set -- in other words, if it is not contained in any set the sum of whose reciprocals converges. This is equivalent to the sum of its reciprocals not converging.
By Fubini's theorem, the sum of the reciprocals of the primes is equal to $\int_1^\infty \frac{\pi(x)}{x^2}\ dx$, where $\pi(x)$ is the number of primes less than x. The prime number theorem tells us that $\pi(x) \sim x/\log x$ for large x, which implies the divergence of this integral. (One does not need the full strength of the PNT here; the more elementary fact that $\pi(x)$ is bounded from below by a constant multiple of $x / \log x$ would suffice.) A variant of this argument shows that $\sum_{p \leq x} 1/p = \log \log x + O(1)$ (again, this can also be shown by more elementary means - see Mertens' theorem).
The same argument shows that slightly thinner sets than the primes would also have this property, e.g. any set for which the analogue of $\pi(x)$ is asymptotically larger than $x / \log x \log \log x$, or $x / \log x \log \log x \log \log \log x$, would still diverge. On the other hand, if the analogue of $\pi(x)$ is $O( x / \log^{1+\varepsilon} x )$ for some $\varepsilon > 0$ then one will have convergence. So the primes are close to the edge of the sparsest set with this property (as one could already guess from the double-logarithmic growth of the sum).
For instance, sieve theory tells us that the number of twin primes less than x is $O( x /\log^2 x)$, which implies Brun's theorem that the sum of reciprocals of twin primes converges.
There is also this result...
$\displaystyle\sum_{a \in A} \frac{1}{a}$ diverges if and only if the span of $\{x^a | a \in A\}$ is dense in the continuous functions on an interval. (I guess you have to include the constant $1$). There is probably no relation to the primes? Or is there?
Also, it is possible to prove that for any numbers a and b for which gcd(a,b)=1, the sum of all the 1/p's for p prime that satisfy p = a (mod b) diverges.
