Strange behaviour of prime numbers

[pier4r]

(05-27-2019 01:41 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  I am frequently amazed and impressed with the enormous amounts of resources and effort folks dedicate to researching Primes, and meta-data about Primes, with no clear predetermined benefit of doing so. Not complaining, just curious why so many people are drawn to research in this area, and what goals they set pursuing such research.

Have any significant non-academic-only results come about as a result of Prime research that isn't well-known, or maybe widely-known, but apparently not by me?

I have a personal answer to this (dunno if it will get refuted in the future if I get more experiences).

Such explorations are challenging but still feasible. It is like "Oh I have this question and I know I need only to find a way to crunch the data, that is feasible to do but requires a bit of work on my side". Therefore they bring satisfaction as well as solving a chess puzzle, or a riddle, a crossword, a sudoku and so on. Only creating the algorithm to solve the problem and sharing the results is (or at least it feels) a bit more valuable.

Then if you think about it most of the topics are focused on well known "simple" problems (read: one can write a procedure relatively quickly). Primes, digits of Pi, digits of E, digits of square root of 2.

No one goes trying finding several thousands digits of, say, square root of 3109. Maybe someone did but there was no follow up. Without considering other more complicated topics in math, programming, logic and what not.

I see it as mostly recreational mathematics that keep the mind of the person sharp and may provide pointers for informative discussions.


PS: for chess lovers, have you tried lichess tactics puzzles? Well don't as otherwise they suck up your time. https://lichess.org/training