Читать книгу The Number Mysteries: A Mathematical Odyssey through Everyday Life - Marcus Sautoy du - Страница 7

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, … it seems so simple: add 1, and you get the next number. Yet without numbers we’d be lost. Arsenal v Man United—who won? We don’t know. Each team got lots. Want to look something up in the index of this book? Well, the bit about winning the National Lottery is somewhere in the middle of the book. And the Lottery itself? Hopeless without numbers. It’s quite extraordinary how fundamental the language of numbers is to negotiating the world.

Even in the animal kingdom, numbers are fundamental. Packs of animals will base their decision to fight or flee on whether their group is outnumbered by a rival pack. Their survival instinct depends in part on a mathematical ability, yet behind the apparent simplicity of the list of numbers lies one of the biggest mysteries of mathematics.

2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, … These are the primes, the indivisible numbers that are the building blocks of all other numbers—the hydrogen and oxygen of the world of mathematics. These protagonists at the heart of the story of numbers are like jewels studded through the infinite expanse of numbers.

Yet despite their importance, prime numbers represent one of the most tantalising puzzles we have come across in our pursuit of knowledge. Knowing how to find the primes is a total mystery because there seems to be no magic formula that gets you from one to the next. They are like buried treasure—and no one has the treasure map.

In this chapter we will explore what we do understand about these special numbers. In the course of the journey we will discover how different cultures have tried to record and survey primes and how musicians have exploited their syncopated rhythm. We will find out why the primes have been used to communicate with extraterrestrials and how they have helped to keep things secret on the Internet. At the end of the chapter I shall unveil a mathematical enigma about prime numbers that will earn you a million dollars if you can crack it. But before we tackle one of the biggest conundrums of mathematics, let us begin with one of the great numerical mysteries of our time.