
Uncovering multiscale order in the prime numbers via scattering - skor
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-5468/aad6be/meta
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aj7
Very suspicious of the whole line of this work. Suspect that the “Bragg peaks”
are trivial. For instance all primes > 3 are in the form 6n + 1 or 6n + 5.

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sidcool
6n+1 or 6n-1, easier to remember.

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DavidSJ
6n±1, even easier. ;)

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eternalban
You can access the paper on arxiv:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.10498](https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.10498)

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selimthegrim
I believe there was a popular exposition of this:

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-chemist-shines-light-on-
a-s...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-chemist-shines-light-on-a-surprising-
prime-number-pattern-20180514/)

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dang
It was posted here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067821)

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MeteorMarc
I did not really study the article, but from the abstract: is is not to be
expected to find semi-regular subseries in an infinite series of prime
numbers?

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benwills
From the abstract: "Our analysis leads to an algorithm that enables one to
predict primes with high accuracy."

From my very, very basic understanding of/curiosity with primes, predicting
primes with any sort of accuracy has been elusive. If this does, in fact, help
to predict primes, it opens up all sorts of possibilities. That's my guess as
to the importance of this article.

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rocqua
I dont have access to the article, but I imagine 'high' is a relative term. In
general, the density of primes arround n is roughly 1/log n; if you could do
significantly better than that say 1/sqrt(log n) you could call that high
accuracy.

Meanwhile, the actual probability of predicting a prime would still be very
low. Note that I am only speculating here.

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amvalo
This is just re-inventing sieve theory with physics jargon.

