Slashdot Mirror
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."
https://www.quantamagazine.org...
And stop linking to the news article only, without linking to the scientific paper. Just for those who care, here is the link: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.0372...
If you rtfa it says "Lemke Oliver and Soundararajan discovered that this sort of bias in the final digits of consecutive primes holds not just in base 3, but also in base 10 and several other bases; they conjecture that it’s true in every base. "