Twin Primes Breakthrough
A pair of mathematicians has made a breakthrough in understanding so-called prime numbers, numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one.
...It was made by Dan Goldston, of San Jose State University, and Cem Yildirim, of Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey. It has just been announced at a conference in Germany on Algorithmic Number Theory. The advance is related to an idea called the twin prime conjecture. This idea, still unproved, is that there are an infinite number of pairs of prime numbers that differ only by two.
...One of the important things about primes is that they are the building blocks of the integers - whole numbers. Primes can be multiplied to obtain all of the other integers.
A curious observation is that primes occur in twins with a surprising regularity. For example: 11 and 13; 17 and 19; 29 and 31; 41 and 43; 59 and 61.
Just as with single primes, the frequency of twin primes decreases as one gets to larger numbers. But do they completely fizzle out beyond some very large number? That is the big question. Around a trillion, for instance, only about one in every 28 numbers is a prime. [BBC]
When I read stuff like this, I realise how useless my life is. Yeah, so anyway, one thing that surprised me was that the article took note of all the major breakthroughs on primes, but failed to mention the work done by the students from IITK. Read more about them here.
A pair of mathematicians has made a breakthrough in understanding so-called prime numbers, numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one.
...It was made by Dan Goldston, of San Jose State University, and Cem Yildirim, of Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey. It has just been announced at a conference in Germany on Algorithmic Number Theory. The advance is related to an idea called the twin prime conjecture. This idea, still unproved, is that there are an infinite number of pairs of prime numbers that differ only by two.
...One of the important things about primes is that they are the building blocks of the integers - whole numbers. Primes can be multiplied to obtain all of the other integers.
A curious observation is that primes occur in twins with a surprising regularity. For example: 11 and 13; 17 and 19; 29 and 31; 41 and 43; 59 and 61.
Just as with single primes, the frequency of twin primes decreases as one gets to larger numbers. But do they completely fizzle out beyond some very large number? That is the big question. Around a trillion, for instance, only about one in every 28 numbers is a prime. [BBC]
When I read stuff like this, I realise how useless my life is. Yeah, so anyway, one thing that surprised me was that the article took note of all the major breakthroughs on primes, but failed to mention the work done by the students from IITK. Read more about them here.
posted by cyph3rpunk at 4/05/2003 05:46:00 PM
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