Prime Spiral
The prime spiral, also known as Ulam's spiral, is a plot in which the positive integers are arranged in a spiral with primes indicated in some way along the spiral.
This construction was first made by Polish-American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam (1909-1986) in 1963 while doodling during a boring talk at a scientific meeting.
While drawing a grid of lines, he decided to number the intersections according to a spiral pattern, and then began circling the numbers in the spiral that were primes.
Surprisingly, the circled primes appeared to fall along a number of diagonal straight lines or, in Ulam's slightly more formal prose, it "appears to exhibit a strongly nonrandom appearance" (Stein et al. 1964). The spiral appeared on the March 1964 cover of Scientific American magazine.
No comments:
Post a Comment