For the first time, my program gave me the wrong answer for a Project Euler question. This one asks you to find the 10,001st smallest prime number, so I wrote a function that would generate a n member list of prime numbers and then return the _n_th member. The function iterated over all odd numbers starting at 5, checked if they were prime, and then added them to the list of primes if they were. The first time I ran the program, it gave me a very high prime, but not the 10,001st. The problem lay in my isPrime() method, which originally read as follows:

private static bool isPrime(int i)
{
    int sqrt = (int)Math.Sqrt(i);
    for (int j = 2; j < sqrt; j++)
        if (i % j == 0) return false;
    return true;
}

A few non-primes had sneaked into my list because sqrt in the above was not actually the square root of i, but the square root of i rounded down to the nearest integer. I replaced the less than evaluation with a less than or equal to, and the right answer was delivered to me in an instant.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace Problem7
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            long hugePrime = generatePrime(10001);
            Console.WriteLine("The 10,001st prime is {0}", hugePrime);
        }

        private static long generatePrime(int p)
        {
            List<long> primes = new List<long>();
            primes.Add(2);
            primes.Add(3);

            for (int i = 5; primes.Count < p; i += 2)
            {
                if (isPrime(i)) { primes.Add(i); }
            }

            return primes[p-1];
        }

        private static bool isPrime(int i)
        {
            int sqrt = (int)Math.Sqrt(i);
            for (int j = 2; j <= sqrt; j++)
                if (i % j == 0) return false;
            return true;
        }
    }
}