Entries tagged with “mathematica cookbook” from O'Reilly Radar

Sat

May 9
2009

Mike Loukides

Hacking Primes in Mathematica

by Mike Loukides@mikeloukidescomments: 9

If this is too esoteric, skip it. I couldn't figure out anywhere else to put it.

This morning, Tim Bray tweeted about a post on prime numbers and Benford's law. To cut the esoterica short, one of the big problems in prime numbers is that people don't know how they're distributed. This post suggests that Benford's Law describes the distribution of the first digit of prime numbers. One of the comments asked an important question: is this really just an artifact of base 10? Math really doesn't "know anything" about bases, so if this idea doesn't generalize to bases other than 10, it doesn't mean much.

(continue reading)

tags: math, mathematica, mathematica cookbook, mathematics, prime numberscomments: 9
submit: Reddit Digg stumbleupon