Aidan Rocke's user avatar
Aidan Rocke's user avatar
Aidan Rocke's user avatar
Aidan Rocke
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On Kepler Lounge I explore the relationship between Information Theory, Number Theory and Algorithmic Probability.


God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers.-Erdős

Mathematicians have tried in vain to this day to discover some order in the sequence of prime numbers, and we have reason to believe that it is a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate. To convince oneself, one has only to glance at the tables of the primes, which some people took the trouble to compute beyond a hundred thousand, and one perceives that there is no order and no rule.-Euler

A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life. The theory of prime numbers satisfies no such criteria. Those who pursue it will, if they are wise, make no attempt to justify their interest in a subject so trivial and so remote, and will console themselves with the thought that the greatest mathematicians of all ages have found in it a mysterious attraction impossible to resist.-Hardy

There is an interesting story behind the above quote typically attributed to Erdős. Although this statement has since entered mathematical folklore, according to Carl Pomerance it is something witty that Erdős might have said in response to Einstein after his co-discovery of the Erdős-Kac law.

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