
Oliver Sacks’s Twins and Prime Numbers (2012) - cjg
http://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and-prime-numbers/
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hellofunk
This is quite interesting and if in 1966 Sacks was encountering this unusual
case of prime numbers in his patients, then this undoubtedly led to his life-
long fascination with prime numbers, I suspect. He is well-known to have
enjoyed a book on prime numbers published nearly 50 years later, The Music of
the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics, saying "I
could not put it down once I had started." I like to think that two autistic
twins inspired in Sacks a life-long enjoyment of this area of mathematics;
that random encounters that can shape your thoughts for decades.

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BellsOnSunday
It doesn't sound like Sacks had a "life-long enjoyment of this area of
mathematics" from the article:

> Sacks mentions another algorithm to test numbers for > primeness. But his
> description only shows that he has no > real mathematical knowledge that
> matters in this case.

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judk
Enjoyment is different from understanding. Sachs career was all about studying
(psychiatric) mysteries that were incomprehensible. It possibly gave him or
fed his magical thinking, which can fly under the radar in psychiatry, but
can't survive educated scrutiny in mathematics. He probably did love prime
numbers, and discussed it with nonmathematicians who didn't see his mistskes.

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judk
Sachs's popular books consistently embellished reality to make a better
popular read, and never really got called out on it by the scientific
community , perhaps because psychiatry was rather unscientific --or rather
pseudodcientific -- thought the early decades of Zach's career. Sachs wasn't
exremely harmful in this respect (relative to the horrors of pre-21st century
psychiatry, including the folder it gave to the rise of Scientology to prey on
The mentally ill), but still provided more infotainment than education.

It is interesting that the author claims that getting a 37% guess correct a
few times consecutively, in one measured attempt, is unsurprising.

