The maths world is a little giddy over a new mystery discovered through brute computing force. No one is quite sure what to make of it, but examining the distribution of prime numbers, mathematicians are realising that they try to be more different from the nearest neighbours on the number line than they need to be.
Prime numbers, above the single digits can only end (regardless of their size) in one of four numbers: 9,7,3 or 1—otherwise, you needn’t bother checking. One might expect that the law of averages would hold
across infinity and there would be a one-in-four chance that one prime might end with the same digit. That does not happen, though, and mathematicians, should the findings hold, are wondering what these apparent aberrations might mean, and whether this might suggest that there is a way to
break encryption and unsettle a formerly secure foundation.
