
A Chemist Shines Light on a Surprising Prime Number Pattern - Luc
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-chemist-shines-light-on-a-surprising-prime-number-pattern-20180514/
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timdellinger
Maybe I'm skimming a little too lightly here, but... diffraction patterns are
just a Fourier transform. If you have a look at prime spirals (Ulam spirals
and Sacks spirals), it's trivial to see that there is some structure that will
turn up in a Fourier transform.

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wyas
This seems closely related to the work on proving the Riemann hypothesis,
where there has been work on attempting to show some quasi-crystalline
structure of the zeta function zeros
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis#Quasicrysta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis#Quasicrystals)).
The Riemann hypothesis itself has deep consequences for the theory of primes.
Cool stuff.

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jshaqaw
I am very much a layman here. Can someone in this space tell me what it means
to shine light on a number?

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knicholes
"Shining light" on something is kind of a metaphor for figuratively
illuminating something, or showing something more clearly (pretend someone
shines light on something in the dark). More precisely, I believe this is
saying that a chemist is providing more information about a prime number
PATTERN.

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tomjakubowski
It's a bit of a pun too, since crystallography is, in essence, shining a light
on something and studying what comes back.

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aj7
OK so he takes the Fourier transform of a non-periodic array of delta
functions with the delta functions being at the prime positions, and notices
peaks at inverse separations of 2, 6, etc. There’s neither X-ray diffraction,
chemistry, or any real math here. Garbage.

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coldtea
If you mean the comment, yes.

