The Case for Excitement about Prime Numbers

Writing for Slate and in response to the recent discovery of a new largest prime, Konstantin Kakaes of the New America Foundation argues that prime numbers should be celebrated.

Touching on everyone and everything from Euclid and the infinitude of primes to Riemann and his zeta function to the trio of MIT professors who devised the RSA algorithm, Kakaes indicates the power and ubiquity of prime numbers.

Kakaes writes:

Just finding one large prime number is a fun puzzle to have solved, but it doesn't say anything basic about how the world works. The patterns behind the primes, however, both proven patterns and ones only suspected, are the lens through which humanity can apprehend deep and unfamiliar truths about how reality is structured.