I am a bit of a numbers nerd and this is a really fascinating development - from Motherboard:
Researchers Discover a Pattern to the Seemingly Random Distribution of Prime Numbers
Often known as “the building blocks of mathematics,” prime numbers have fascinated mathematicians for centuries due to their highly unpredictable and seemingly random nature. However, a team of researchers at Princeton University have recently discovered a strange pattern in the primes’ chaos. Their novel modelling techniques revealed a surprising similarity between primes and certain naturally occurring crystalline materials, a similarity that may carry significant implications for physics and materials science.
What are primes?
Prime numbers are integers (whole numbers) that can only be divided by themselves or the number 1, and they appear along the number line in a highly erratic way.
They begin as 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 and continue to appear intermittently all the way to infinity. However, the further along the number line you go, the more random the distribution of primes appears to be. The lack of any obvious pattern was best summarized by British mathematician R.C. Vaughan: “It is evident that the primes are randomly distributed but, unfortunately, we do not know what ‘random’ means.”
This is going to impact several diciplines as well as making it a lot easier to discover new primes - now we are using a brute force approach. Primes are very useful for cryptography. Link to the oroginal paper is here: Uncovering multiscale order in the prime numbers via scattering
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