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Judi Lynn

(160,542 posts)
Tue Sep 18, 2018, 01:00 AM Sep 2018

Chemists Have Found a Strange Pattern Hidden in The Sequence of Prime Numbers


"A completely new category of structures."

MIKE MCRAE 17 SEP 2018
Prime numbers have intrigued, baffled, and amazed us for millennia.

They're often thought of as the building blocks of mathematics, but one of their most fascinating properties is that they appear to occur randomly - which is why mathematicians spend so long searching for the next highest prime (the last one we found was 23,249,425 digits in size).

Still, give humans something that seems purely random, and we can't help ourselves but look for a hidden meaning, or a pattern to make sense of it.

This isn't just for laughs, either; the randomness of prime numbers forms a basis of a form of encryption called an RSA algorithm.

More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/quasicrystal-pattern-identified-prime-numbers-x-ray-diffration
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