Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Sacks Spiral (Prime Number Pattern)

Robert Sacks devised the Sacks spiral, a variant of the Ulam spiral, in 1994.

The Ulam spiral, or prime spiral (in other languages also called the Ulam cloth) is a simple method of graphing the prime numbers that reveals a pattern. It was discovered by the mathematician Stanisław Ulam in 1963, while doodling on scratch paper at a scientific meeting. Ulam, bored that day, wrote down a regular grid of numbers, starting with 1 at the center, and spiraling out:

Numbers from 1 to 50 placed in spiral order
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2 comments:

  1. cybrbeast01 January, 2009 16:34

    Bizarre patterns. What does it mean? Math is scary :)

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  2. annom01 January, 2009 19:34

    They (and I) don't know what it means. It's completely unexplained as far as I understand.

    ReplyDelete