You remember prime numbers, right?

Those numbers you can’t

divide into other numbers, except when you divide them by
themselves or 1? Right. Here is a 3000 year old question:

 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, p. What is p? 31. What is the
next p? It’s 37. The p after that? 41. And then? 43. How, but…
…how do you know what comes next?

Present an argument or formula which (even barely) predicts what

the next prime number will be (in any given sequence of
numbers), and your name will be forever linked to one of the
greatest achievements of the human mind, akin to Newton,
Einstein and Gödel. Figure out why the primes act as they do, and
you will never have to do anything else, ever again.

Introduction
The properties of the prime numbers have been studied by many
of history’s mathematical giants. From the first proof of the
infinity of the primes by Euclid, to Euler’s product formula which
connected the prime numbers to the zeta function. From Gauss
and Legendre’s formulation of the prime number theorem to its
proof by Hadamard and de la Vallée Poussin. Bernhard Riemann
still reigns as the mathematician who made the single biggest
breakthrough in prime number theory. His work, all contained in
an 8 page paper published in 1859 made new and previously
unknown discoveries about the distribution of the primes and is to
this day considered to be one of the most important papers in
number theory.

Since its publication, Riemann’s paper has been the main focus of
prime number theory and was indeed the main reason for the
proof of something called the prime number theorem in 1896.
Since then several new proofs have been found, including
elementary proofs by Selberg and Erdós. Riemann’s hypothesis
about the roots of the zeta function however, remains a mystery.

How many primes are there?

Let’s start off easy. We all know that a number is
either prime or composite. All composite numbers are made up of,
and can be broken down (factorized) into a product (a x b) of
prime numbers. Prime numbers are in this way the “building
blocks” or “fundamental elements” of numbers. They were proven
to be infinite in number by Euclid, 300 years BCE. His elegant
proof goes as follows:

Euclid’s theorem

Assume that the set of prime numbers is not infinite. Make a list
of all the primes. Next, let P be the product of all the primes in the
list (multiply all the primes in the list). Add 1 to the resulting
number, Q = P +1. As with all numbers, this number Q has to be
either prime or composite:

- If Q is prime, you’ve found a prime that was not in your “list of

all the primes”.

- If Q is not prime, it is composite, i.e made up of prime numbers,

one of which, p, would divide Q (since all composite numbers are
products of prime numbers). Every prime p that makes up P
obviously divides P. If p divides both P and Q, then it would have
to also divide the difference between the two, which is 1. No
prime number divides 1, and so the number p cannot be on your
list, another contradiction that your list contains all prime
numbers.

There will always be another prime p not on the list which divides
Q. Therefore there must be infinitely many primes numbers.

Why are primes so hard to understand?

The mere fact that any novice understands the problem I laid out
above, speaks volumes about how difficult it is. Even the
arithmetic properties of primes, while heavily studied, are still
poorly understood. The scientific community is so confident in our
lacking ability to understand how prime numbers behave that the
factorization of large numbers (figuring out which two primes
multiply together to make a number) is one of the the very
foundations of encryption theory. Here’s one way of looking at it:

We understand composite numbers well. Those are all the non-

primes. They are made up of primes, but you can easily write a
formula that predicts and/or generates composites. Such a
“composite filter” is called a sieve. The most famous example is
named the “Sieve of Eratosthenes” from c. 200 BCE. What it does,
is simply mark the multiples of each prime up to a set limit. So,
take the prime 2, and mark 4,6,8,10 and so on. Next, take 3, and
mark 6,9,12,15 and so on. What you’ll be left with is only primes.
Although very simple to understand, the sieve of Erathosthenes is
as you can imagine, not very efficient.

One function simplifying your work significantly is 6n +/- 1. This

simple function spits out all primes except 2 and 3, and removes
all multiples of 3 and all even numbers. Put in for n = 1,2,3,4,5,6,7
and behold the result: 5,7,11,13,17,19,23,25,29,31,35,37,41,43. The
only non-prime numbers generated by the function are 25 and 35,
which can be factorized into 5 x 5 and 5 x 7, respectively. The next
non-primes are, as you can imagine, 49 = 7 x 7, 55 = 5 x 11 and so
on. Simple right?

Illustrating this visually, I’ve used something that I’m calling

“composite ladders”, a simple way to see how the composite
numbers generated by the function are laid out for each prime,
and combined. In the first three columns of the image below, you
neatly see the prime numbers 5, 7 and 11 with each respective
composite ladder up to and including 91. The chaos of the fourth
column, showing how the sieve has removed all but the prime
numbers, is a fair illustration of why prime numbers are so hard to
understand.
Fundamental Resources
So what does this all have to do with this thing you may have
heard of called the “Riemann hypothesis”? Well, said simply, in
order to understand more about primes, mathematicians in the
1800s stopped trying to predict with absolute certainty where a
prime number was, and instead started looking at the
phenomenon of prime numbers as a whole.
This analytic approach is what Riemann was a master of, and
where his famous hypothesis was made. Before I can explain it
however, it is necessary to get familiar with some fundamental
resources.

The Harmonic Series

The harmonic series is an infinite series of numbers first studied
by Nicholas Oresme in the 14th century. Its name relates to the
concept of harmonics in music, overtones higher than the
fundamental frequency of a tone. The series is as follows:

The first terms of the infinite harmonic series

This sum was proven to be divergent by Oresme (not having a
finite limit, not approaching/tending towards any particular
number, but running off into infinity).

Zeta Functions
The harmonic series is a special case of a more general type of
function called a zeta function ζ(s). The real valued zeta function is
given for r and n, two real numbers:

The Zeta Function

If you put in for n = 1, you get the harmonic series, which diverges.
For all values of n > 1 however, the series converges, meaning the
sum tends towards some number as the value of r increases, i.e it
does not run off into infinity.

The Euler Product Formula

The first connection between zeta functions and prime numbers
was made by Euler when he showed that for n and p, two natural
numbers (integers larger than zero) where p is prime:
The Euler Product Formula for two numbers n, p where both are larger than zero and p is a prime
number

This expression first appeared in a paper in 1737 entitled Variae

observationes circa series infinitas. The expression states that
the sum of the zeta function is equal to the product of the
reciprocal of one minus the reciprocal of primes to the power
s. This astonishing connection laid the foundation for modern
prime number theory, which from this point on used the zeta
function ζ(s) as a way of studying primes.