soent his teenage summers pulling rhythmically on the oars , circling the cove , mostly alone thinking . his parents didn't bother him , and he had no friends , so hewas free to think . sometimes he thoughts about girls , but mostly he thought about calculus . he began carrying a sprial notebook with him to record his thoughts . when it filled , he would start a new one .
nubers ; the integers , the irrational , the transcendents . th imaginaries ; numbers that presentd mysteries brighter and more challenging than the mysteries of religion , because they could be solved with logic , someday , by someone .
he had first met the greatest mytery of all , the mystery of the prime numbers , when he was ten years old .
how these buiolding blocks of all numbers are distributed along the great number line has never been understood .they seem to occur at random -2,3,5,7,11,17b - and so on and on forever to those regons of monstrous limitlessness where elliott's little breeze blew . an integer was a prime number if you copuldn't divide it by any other integer except itself and one . but no formula copuld predict the sequence of primes . no formula could find the factors large numbers , except by the crude method of searching one by one along the number line .
yet all the great minds in mathematics over all the centuries agrrees on one thing : the primes could not be random . if they were random . the ground of the universe was random, and this could not be , not with planets revolving around stars , not with the soatring bridges and skycrapers people have built . not with the human eye , which seeks and finds harmony everywhere .
no, the primes could not not be rndomly distributed . one day as he furiously rowed across the flat water . elliot made up his mind to devote his life to the primes . if he introduced a newdevil into the world , if he found truth that added to chaos instead of harmony , he would hold his answer close and decide then what to do with it .
nubers ; the integers , the irrational , the transcendents . th imaginaries ; numbers that presentd mysteries brighter and more challenging than the mysteries of religion , because they could be solved with logic , someday , by someone .
he had first met the greatest mytery of all , the mystery of the prime numbers , when he was ten years old .
how these buiolding blocks of all numbers are distributed along the great number line has never been understood .they seem to occur at random -2,3,5,7,11,17b - and so on and on forever to those regons of monstrous limitlessness where elliott's little breeze blew . an integer was a prime number if you copuldn't divide it by any other integer except itself and one . but no formula copuld predict the sequence of primes . no formula could find the factors large numbers , except by the crude method of searching one by one along the number line .
yet all the great minds in mathematics over all the centuries agrrees on one thing : the primes could not be random . if they were random . the ground of the universe was random, and this could not be , not with planets revolving around stars , not with the soatring bridges and skycrapers people have built . not with the human eye , which seeks and finds harmony everywhere .
no, the primes could not not be rndomly distributed . one day as he furiously rowed across the flat water . elliot made up his mind to devote his life to the primes . if he introduced a newdevil into the world , if he found truth that added to chaos instead of harmony , he would hold his answer close and decide then what to do with it .
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