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Comment by aaronharnly | Hacker News Reader

Very, very lovely. You might (or might not) also be familiar with the Ulam Spiral[1] or the arguably more beautiful Sacks Spiral[2], which do reveal certain patterns in the distribution of the primes.

I used the software from this site[3] to generate a large Sacks spiral graphic, which I had custom-printed on my shower curtain. To most folks who see it, it's just some pattern of dots, but knowing the order within gives me great joy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulam_spiral

[2] http://www.numberspiral.com

[3] http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~jhw/spirals/index.html

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Thanks for the links. Math is awesome, and this kinda stuff really gets one going. No wonder some people (mathematicians) get hooked on prime numbers for the rest of their lives. It's beautiful.

Fantastic.

Fig.5 from [2] (Sacks spiral) reminded me of light cones tipping over and pointing at the singularity as one enters a black hole.

[0] http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/bla...

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-singularities/#G...

  which do reveal certain patterns

Perceived patterns. If an actual pattern was known, you could generate prime numbers from the pattern. No such pattern is known to exist.

It's probabilistic, but there are patterns (lines with significantly greater prime densities than others).

There are TONS of patterns in the primes.

Name me a pattern that, from the primes below 100, can be used to extrapolate, with certainty, the first prime above 100.

That's an awfully restrictive definition of "pattern." For what it's worth, I'd say that more mathematics has been devoted to the study of patterns in the primes than to any other single topic.

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