Peculiar pattern found in ‘random’ prime numbers | |
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Anonymous Coward User ID: 17205702 United States 04/29/2016 06:43 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Two mathematicians have found a strange pattern in prime numbers — showing that the numbers are not distributed as randomly as theorists often assume. Quoting: Anonymous Coward 72119533 “Every single person we’ve told this ends up writing their own computer program to check it for themselves,” says Kannan Soundararajan, a mathematician at Stanford University in California, who reported the discovery with his colleague Robert Lemke Oliver in a paper submitted to the arXiv preprint server on 11 March1. “It is really a surprise,” he says. Prime numbers near to each other tend to avoid repeating their last digits, the mathematicians say: that is, a prime that ends in 1 is less likely to be followed by another ending in 1 than one might expect from a random sequence. “As soon as I saw the numbers, I could see it was true,” says mathematician James Maynard of the University of Oxford, UK. “It’s a really nice result.” Although prime numbers are used in a number of applications, such as cryptography, this ‘anti-sameness’ bias has no practical use or even any wider implication for number theory, as far as Soundararajan and Lemke Oliver know. But, for mathematicians, it’s both strange and fascinating. [link to www.nature.com] Blind Science Discovers What Common Sense Already Knew |
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