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Comment by airesearcher | Hacker News Reader

Yep - we are not claiming to be mathematicians, we're pattern hunters... this is an open invitation to others with more expertise to chime in and help figure this out... it's possible it is a minor discovery or even not a discovery... or it could be useful or even very useful. We don't know. Please help us explore it!

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Either way, hearing a mathematician explain why this is a non-discovery would still be interesting to pretty much anyone who doesn't study primes. Kudos on a cool visualization.

If nothing else, this depiction of prime numbers looks very satisfying for recreational mathematics, much more so than the Ulam spiral. I think students who learn how to generate this pattern will be inspired to learn more about math.

”we are not claiming to be mathematicians, we're pattern hunters.”

“Searching for interesting tautologies” or “Hunting for patterns” are good descriptions of what mathematicians do.

Mathematicians do mathematics because they want to be sure that a) they caught a pattern and b) that it is interesting. That’s what’s being discussed here.

Actually there is a pattern. Take a look at the Mathematica code on GitHub.

I think the parent's trying to tell you guys not to sell yourselves short - that what you're doing is exactly what mathematics is.

It will be interesting to see if this pattern falls apart when the numbers are reasonably large (like roughly 300 digits+).

These visualization techniques have something going for them. I mean, it's amazing work and with new visualizations, people will make new conclusions based thereon much more easily. Analytic continuation ad nauseum. :)

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