Browsing Tag
Outwit
2 posts
Mathematicians Outwit a Hidden Number ‘Conspiracy’
Intuition tells mathematicians that adding 2 to a number should completely change its multiplicative structure—meaning there should be no correlation between whether a number is prime (a multiplicative property) and whether the number two units away is prime (an additive property). Number theorists have found no evidence to suggest that such a correlation exists, but…
Mathematicians Outwit Hidden Number Conspiracy
A new proof has debunked a conspiracy that mathematicians feared might haunt the number line. In doing so, it has given them another set of tools for understanding arithmetic’s fundamental building blocks, the prime numbers. In a paper posted last March, Harald Helfgott of the University of Göttingen in Germany and Maksym Radziwiłł of the California Institute of Technology presented…