This is a ‘No Post’ today. Just to explain… I have two main blogs, a wife and 3 children and 5 grandchildren and my novel #2 to get published (when I find a keen agent). This is why my posts are not as regular as they might be. However, to the observant mathematician, you will […]
Two academics have shocked themselves and the world of mathematics by discovering a pattern in prime numbers. Primes – numbers greater than 1 that are divisible only by themselves and 1 – are considered the ‘building blocks’ of mathematics, because every number is either a prime or can be built by multiplying primes together – (84, […]
Prime numbers are cool. As Carl Sagan points out so eloquently in the novel Contact, there’s a certain importance to their status as the most fundamental building block of all numbers, which are themselves the building blocks of our understanding of the universe. Whether it’s communicating your credit card information to Amazon, logging into your […]
A few years ago an old school textbook that H3 used explained that 1 was not a prime number “because of the Liquorice Factory”! The attached pdf is a great worksheet for students (and other readers of this blog) to examine the kind of machines that we need in order to produce liquorice in lengths […]
In a recent online discussion (read more here) about Prime Numbers, was this extract regarding the importance of research; “For what it’s worth, a great deal of mathematical research has no known application and little or no bearing on other fields. Some very smart people (Russell, Hardy) have argued that this is not a bad […]
OK. Here is a sign at a bus stop in Singapore. Can you work out the different types of numbers – any primes; any squared numbers, odds and evens, etc.? It still amazes H3 how many students use numbers like these each day, but never actually study them. The mental gymnastics of number analysis is […]
Prime Spirals: Because prime numbers are indivisible (except by 1 and themselves), and because all other numbers can be written as multiples of them, they are often regarded as the “atoms” of the math world. Despite their importance, the distribution of prime numbers among the integers is still a mystery. There is no pattern dictating which […]
