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New Pattern Found In Prime Numbers
stephen.schaubach writes "Spanish Mathematicians have discovered a new pattern in primes that surprisingly has gone unnoticed until now. 'They found that the distribution of the leading digit in the prime number sequence can be described by a generalization of Benford's law. ... Besides providing insight into the nature of primes, the finding could also have applications in areas such as fraud detection and stock market analysis. ... Benford's law (BL), named after physicist Frank Benford in 1938, describes the distribution of the leading digits of the numbers in a wide variety of data sets and mathematical sequences. Somewhat unexpectedly, the leading digits aren't randomly or uniformly distributed, but instead their distribution is logarithmic. That is, 1 as a first digit appears about 30% of the time, and the following digits appear with lower and lower frequency, with 9 appearing the least often.'"
It turns out that they're all odd numbers.
I don't get it. Surely there's a better major than "mathematics"? I recently went to my college's "scholar day" wherein students created posters and described what they were working on for classroom projects. The engineering students received lots of attention, since they were building "cool" stuff like solar cabins or battery-powered boats or whatever.
But then I noticed one cute young lady was standing all by herself, in front of her project, which consisted of lots of esoteric math. I felt sorry for her because she was basically being ignored, so I asked her to give her brief explanation. When she was done I wondered if she was going to be unemployed in a few years, because I could not see how her knowledge had any application in the real world.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall