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Mathematicians Discover Prime Conspiracy (quantamagazine.org)
An anonymous reader writes with an intriguing story at Quanta Magazine, which begins: 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. In a paper posted online today, Kannan Soundararajan and Robert Lemke Oliver of Stanford University present both numerical and theoretical evidence that prime numbers repel other would-be primes that end in the same digit, and have varied predilections for being followed by primes ending in the other possible final digits. "We've been studying primes for a long time, and no one spotted this before," said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the University of Montreal and University College London. "It's crazy."
Stop anthropomorphizing prime numbers. They hate that!
>Two mathematicians have uncovered a simple, previously unnoticed property of prime numbers — those numbers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves.
Did anyone else LOL when they read the first sentence. My first thought was who wouldn't notice primes are only divisible by 1 and themselves it's the definition, duh.
Great, now he has to come up with a new one.
Private keys are supposed to be kept secret, dammit!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
10 is divisible by 1,2, 5, and 10, so how is it prime?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.