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I think the parent is saying that the statement: Looking at prime numbers written in base 3 — in which roughly half the primes end in 1 and half end in 2 —
by indiv0 11y ago
I think the parent is saying that the statement:
Looking at prime numbers written in base 3 — in which roughly half the primes end in 1 and half end in 2 — he found that among primes smaller than 1,000, a prime ending in 1 is more than twice as likely to be followed by a prime ending in 2 than by another prime ending in 1
is not interesting (as it seems to be just numerology), UNLESS the authors' conjecture is also true (that the statement also holds for bases > 2).
- kafkaesq 11y agoThe important part is that the authors (and several others) have verified the statistics out to a few hundred billion primes -- and that while the bias does start to drop out, it does so "very slowly." That's what makes this result not "numerology."
- baddox 11y agoIt's interesting to me.
- monochromatic 11y agoNo, it would be interesting even if it only happened in one base. It's still unexpected.