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I’m curious as I hadn’t seen it before and it’s gripping: Is the patterns showing in a polar plot of the prime numbers a recent discovery or is it long known and just used as an illustration? What is it called and what is its history?

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Numberphile[1] and 3b1b[2] (with a particularly good explanation of why it happens) have done good videos on the prime spiral.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFuR97YcSLM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK32jo7i5LQ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulam_spiral for more reading, Sacks spiral is from 1994.

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