LanDroid Prince
Joined: 11 Jun 2002 Posts: 4470 Location: Cincinnati, OH U.S.
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Posted: Sun Mar 20, 2016 1:31 pm Post subject: Prime Conspiracy |
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Quote: | Mathematicians Discover Prime Conspiracy
A previously unnoticed property of prime numbers seems to violate a longstanding assumption about how they behave.
Two mathematicians have uncovered a simple, previously unnoticed property of prime numbers — those numbers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. Prime numbers, it seems, have decided preferences about the final digits of the primes that immediately follow them. Among the first billion prime numbers, for instance, a prime ending in 9 is almost 65 percent more likely to be followed by a prime ending in 1 than another prime ending in 9.
...The discovery is the exact opposite of what most mathematicians would have predicted, said Ken Ono, a number theorist at Emory University in Atlanta. When he first heard the news, he said, “I was floored. I thought, ‘For sure, your program’s not working.’”
This conspiracy among prime numbers seems, at first glance, to violate a longstanding assumption in number theory: that prime numbers behave much like random numbers. Most mathematicians would have assumed, Granville and Ono agreed, that a prime should have an equal chance of being followed by a prime ending in 1, 3, 7 or 9 (the four possible endings for all prime numbers except 2 and 5).
3/13/16
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160313-mathematicians-discover-prime-conspiracy/ |
Also posted on Prime Grid:
http://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=6713
Shrub on!
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