The Importance of Prime Numbers
I completely forgot about “Pi Day”. It's all a load of numerology rubbish anywaythe date coincided with the sequence of numbers in the decimal presentation of Pi3.1415 only if you put parts of the year, month, and day in a specific order.
I have a much more better story to relate anyway. One about prime numbers.
Once upon a time my older brother asked me why prime numbers were important. He never found mathematics easy at school, and couldn't understand all the fuss was about. I'm certainly not a math genius, but I've read a few books over the years, and have fostered a nerdy appreciation for the beauty and elegance of numbers, and the various equations, algorithms, and relationships that have been discovered throughout history.
As an aside, there is a wonderful book called “The Parrot's Theorem”, written by a mathematics lecturer that I think everybody should readperhaps another story for another day.
I'm getting side-tracked. Prime Numbers are important in the grand scheme of things because they are not the product of other numbers. If you have a prime, you have something finitesomething absolute. You suddenly know more about the number than it's simple magnitude.
Useful purposes for prime numbers are difficult to relate in real-world termsthey are used extensively in computer encryption and compression algorithms, for example, but unless your degree at University was centred on that field, your interest is going to evaporate as soon as I begin describing why they are usedso I shall not.
Ok. Maybe one explanation.
The “fundamental theorem of arithmetic” (I think I got the title right) states that all numbers greater than one can be expressed as the product of primes, and that only one mixture of primes will multiply to result in a given number. You can immediately imagine how that might be used to compress data.
This is where I stop talking, because anybody except the girl I used to work with will find this entire post soporific beyond belief.p.s. the attached image illustrates the hidden beauty that we sometimes see in nature. The distribution of the dots is based on the occurrence of prime numbers in a sequential pattern