Mathematicians stunned by ‘unrandomness’ discovery of prime numbers
The infinite world of prime numbers just got a little more finite, after a pair of mathematicians discovered the prime number sequence isn’t as random as once thought.
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The paper this article is reporting is here: Unexpected Biases In The Distribution Of Consecutive Primes (full pdf available).
I’m still reading it, and will comment more fully later, but the basic discovery is this: the last digit of a prime number greater then 5 is 1, 3, 7, or 9. If a prime number ends with 1, there should be a 25% probability that the next prime ends with 1; it turns out that the actual probability is about 18% (there’s more, but the results are similar.) This suggests a previously-unknown bias in prime distribution. Note that (despite the sensationalist headlines) the infinity of primes is not affected; there are still infinitely many of them.
btm said:
The paper this article is reporting is here: Unexpected Biases In The Distribution Of Consecutive Primes (full pdf available).I’m still reading it, and will comment more fully later, but the basic discovery is this: the last digit of a prime number greater then 5 is 1, 3, 7, or 9. If a prime number ends with 1, there should be a 25% probability that the next prime ends with 1; it turns out that the actual probability is about 18% (there’s more, but the results are similar.) This suggests a previously-unknown bias in prime distribution. Note that (despite the sensationalist headlines) the infinity of primes is not affected; there are still infinitely many of them.