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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."
https://www.quantamagazine.org...
Stop anthropomorphizing prime numbers. They hate that!
Only 65%? Pft. In base 2, every prime number is 100% likely to be followed by a prime ending in 1.
>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.
I wonder if this has anything to do with Twin primes. If a prime ends in 9, then its twin will end in 1, and so we should expect primes ending in 9 to more often be followed by primes ending in 1. The number of twin primes is believed to be infinite, but they get more sparse as you go towards infinity (proportional to 1/(ln(n)^2)), even faster than primes (proportional to 1/ln(n)), so if they are responsible for the bias, then the bias should diminish as you go up.
This seems wrong to me. Both Alice and Bob have equal chance of rolling a head, hence on average they will need the same number of tries to arrive at a head toss; and since coins dont have memory, the next toss has equal chance of being head or tail. So I do expect the chances of head head and head tail to be the same.
Yes, it's called a veridical paradox. That's something that seems impossible but is nonetheless true. You can verify it by flipping a coin, or running a computer simulation using a good random number generator.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
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.
Everyone with at least a passing interest in cryptography and computer security does. Primes is basically what we rely on in these fields.
Quite seriously, every time someone comes up with a claim that something can be done "more easily", "more efficiently" or generally "faster" in a field that remotely touches on prime numbers, you can see the ripples in the fabric of spacetime from cryptographers shaking in their boots.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Intuitively it makes sense. Assume the first H has been tossed. For Alice, she fails by tossing another H. However, this second H can be the first H of a successful HT sequence, so in failure there is a silver lining - she's halfway to success and can stop after tossing a single T. Full sequence: HHT.
For Bob, after tossing the first H, tossing a T means he has to start over. He needs to toss another H first, followed by yet another H to succeed. His task is harder. Full sequence: HTHH.
The twin prime conjecture is independent of the base, so the base doesn't matter for it to be true or false.
I would find this surprising, since in a base 2 system every prime number ending in 1 is followed by a prime number ending in 1.
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.