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Published online 24 March 2003 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news030317-13
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Prime numbers not so random?
A kind of order may be buried in the occurrence of indivisible numbers.
A team of physicists may have stumbled upon a surprising discovery about one of the deepest and best-studied questions in pure mathematics: whether or not prime numbers appear randomly in the sequence of whole numbers.
Pradeep Kumar and colleagues at Boston University1reckon that they have found a kind of order among the distribution of primes, the numbers that cannot be divided by any smaller number other than 1.
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