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Can anyone summarize this for people (such as myself) who have a hard time understanding what's going on with all this prime number stuff?

• aviwl 11y ago
  There is no reasonable formula for generating prime numbers. So let's treat primes as if they were empirical data points instead of deterministic mathematical constants. From this lens, the statistical properties of primes are very simple to predict. That's what all these conjectures are about: finding out what sort of probability distribution would produce random numbers that look like the primes.
  • chipperyman573 11y ago
    And people just now realized that you could look at prime numbers this way?
    • aviwl 11y ago
      As stated in the article, those conjectures were made in 1923. The recent quanta article https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160313-mathematicians-discover-prime-conspiracy/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160313-mathematicians-disco... involves a new correlation discovered in the primes, which means that the statistical model is more interesting than we previously thought. For a mathematician's perspective on the recent breakthrough, I recommend https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/biases-between-consecutive-primes/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/biases-between-con....