Networks Enlisted to Find Patterns in Primes

To investigate how the primes are distributed, researchers at Spain's University of Barcelona turned the numbers from two to one billion into a network by linking composite numbers to their prime factors.

Marián Boguñá and colleagues also generated similar networks using simple linking rules and have found that the networks produced closely resemble the actual network of primes and composites.

The hope is that having lots of prime-like networks to work with will yield insight into outstanding problems such as the Riemann hypothesis.

Read New Scientist's coverage.