It turned out that sequences containing about a million primes - such as the series starting with 10,000,000,019 - were sufficient to generate a meaningful analysis without incurring too much statistical noise. Torquato, with grad student Ge Zhang, modeled long prime sequences as one-dimensional strings of particles, with primes represented by small spheres off which x-rays would bounce. Torquato started wondering if there was a way to apply this analytic method to numbers, and what he might see. Different materials produce different x-ray diffraction patterns. In chemistry, it’s common to analyze the atomic structure of matter by firing x-rays at it and observing the ways in which the x-rays bounce off the material’s atoms. ![]() ![]() (From Quanta: Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Quanta Magazine Crystal diffraction pattern by Sven.hovmoeller Quasicrystal diffraction pattern by Materialscientist) Looking at primes in a different way
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