PRIMETIME

STRANGE PATTERNS IN PRIME NUMBERS

BART ALDER
2018
For Martin Darke
THE NEVERENDING SIEVE OF ERATOSTHENES
You likely recall from your high school maths that prime numbers can be located by a simple sieving
system. That is all the background needed for reading this and so I will cover what that sieve is next
anyway just in case it evades the memory in the moment.

You can write out a very long list of all the counting numbers in ascending order starting from 1 going
up to any desired maximum you like and then begin sieving by deleting 1, circling the number 2 and
then deleting every other number on the list which is divisible by two. That means deleting every
second number. This can mean deleting whole columns of numbers in a single go if you arrange your
list of numbers in an array of rows and columns and you decide to have an even number of columns
in the first place. A pretty neat trick which saves much time when really doing a sieve by hand using
pen and paper.

The pattern is always the same though, you circle the next smallest number not already circled which
is 3 and you now delete every third number on the list which removes every odd number also divisible
by three (every even number divisible by 3 was already removed of course). This can also mean
deleting entire columns if you have arranged to have any number of columns which is also divisible by
3. A useful number of columns is 30 since 30 = 2x3x5, it is what you get from multiplying the first three
primes. This means deleting nearly all of the factorable numbers in your list by a process of deleting
entire columns but it is not actually necessary to set this up that way.

You keep going, circling the smallest uncircled number which also hasn’t already been crossed out.
Next will be 5, then 7, then 11 and so on, always deleting all multiples of a given number from your
list. The sieve naturally halts at some point, that happens when every number on your list is either
circled (and therefore prime) or deleted (and therefore factorable).

This is the sieve of Eratosthenes. You locate the primes by such a simple method, all the most obvious
computer algorithms locating primes are based on it. It is mathematical gardening, a method of
clearing out the factorable weeds and leaving only prime roses. This is not the fastest sieve possible
but it is definitely the simplest and also the most ancient.

Imagine you are given the job of Prime Housing Officer and tasked with giving every one of the prime
numbers sequential addresses on Prime Lane. You number the houses in ascending order starting at
1 and you find you need an infinite number of houses on Prime Lane to house the infinite number of
primes.

There is a branch of mathematics which handles infinities and in that branch of mathematics, when
doing your analysis, you always set up correspondences between two ordered sets of numbers and
compare their two kinds of infinities by the ability to establish such correspondences or the
impossibility of setting up such correspondences. We are doing the same kind of thing here by giving
every prime an address on Prime Lane. Because we are dealing with primes and because there are
infinitely many primes, we are going to find some rather weird properties apply to the primes.

Galileo was an early person to care about infinities enough to boggle over them. He noted that when
you delete all the even numbers from the counting numbers you are still left with an infinite number
of odd numbers. He was very close to hitting on Cantor’s method.

What he was noticing is that you can write two or three lists of numbers and compare the length of
the lists and match the entries.
 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, …

2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, …

1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, …

Galileo was deeply upset by this, that there are as many even numbers (or odd numbers) as there
were counting numbers. You can subtract an infinite number of numbers from an infinite number of
numbers and be left with an infinite number of numbers. Very weird indeed and the more it is
contemplated the weirder it gets.

There are also different kinds of infinities and these are analysed in this exact same way of comparing
infinities to other infinities and not being able to produce correspondences between those lists. This
program of research into infinities has been ongoing since Georg Cantor first invented the first ever
method to attack the problem in the early 20th century. By doing so he was able to prove that there
really are, somehow, more Real numbers than there are ordinary counting numbers. Both are infinite
but they are somehow also not infinities of the same kind, one of these infinities is definitely bigger
than the other.

In more technical language, two different kinds of infinities which cannot be set up in a perfect
correspondence have a different cardinality. The reason for mentioning this is that the primes are
what is called countably infinite. That just means they have the same cardinality, same kind of infinity
as the ordinary counting numbers. When you set up a correspondence between them you are forced
to connect the primes with a counting number and the easiest way to do this is to number the primes,
and that means giving the primes an address on Prime Lane and in ascending order of value.

TROUBLE AT PRIME LANE

So the number 2 lives at 1 Prime Lane being the first of the primes. The number 3 is the second prime
and must live at 2 Prime lane. The number 5 lives at 3 Prime Lane and so on. Every prime has an
address and every address contains one and only one prime. This is an exact correspondence. It is
what mathematicians refer to as bijective. That only means if you give me a specific address on Prime
Lane then there must exist a scheme by which I can locate the only possible prime that lives there. But
also it means that if you give me a specific prime number then there must exist some scheme by which
I can give you their unique address. This characteristic of uniqueness is called ‘one to one’, meaning
there is a one to one correspondence between input and output. If you give me an address and the
scheme instead gives you back two prime numbers then it is not ‘one to one’. Also, the process of
being able to locate a unique prime given a unique address or vice versa to a scheme is called ‘onto’.
So ‘onto’ means there’s a process which will always work. So onto implies an algorithm exists which is
never wrong if applied correctly. So you will hear a mathematician say a function is ‘one to one and
onto’, a phrase so awkward and unhelpfully opaque in meaning they mostly just say bijective.

Now a Prime Crime Inspector comes to Prime Lane one day and his only job as he has been instructed
to do it, is to locate any address which is a prime number and he has been told to arrest and detain
the occupant. Being a Prime Crime expert and in his prime, so to speak, he skips 1 Prime Lane since 1
is not prime and starts by arresting the occupant of 2 Prime Lane. Then he arrests the occupant of 3
Prime Lane. Then the occupant of 5 Prime Lane and then 7, 11, 13, 17 and so on until he’s arrested
the infinitely many primes who have the misfortune of living in a house on Prime Lane which also has
a prime numbered address. Call these the ‘prime numbered primes’ or say they are ‘at least doubly
prime’. The phrase ‘at least’ will prove to be significant.
The Prime Crime Inspector now has an infinite jail to go to so as to drop off all the infinite number of
prime numbers he has arrested. Note that he has also left an infinite number of primes behind, all of
whom are utterly delighted to have turned out to live at a factorable address. Call these stay-behinds,
‘singularly primed primes’.

For the arrested primes, however, each one of them was already on Prime Lane and so by definition
they were already a prime number, but they also lived at prime numbered addresses as well. So they
are really being convicted of being ‘at least doubly prime’. For this reason, the Warden petitions the
council to rename the prison Doubly Prime Jail and his petition is accepted and the motion carried.

Upon their arrival at Doubly Prime Jail each number is given their own unique cell and to keep things
very simple for everyone they are incarcerated in ascending order of numerical value. The first number
arrested was the occupant of 2 Prime Lane. That was the number 3 because 3 is the second prime. As
the smallest prime arrested they now go into cell 1. In cell 2 goes the second smallest prime arrested,
that is the occupant of 3 Prime Lane and that was the number 5 because 5 is the third prime. So, you
can see that the occupants of Prime Lane have been sieved a second time now and the only numbers
we are interested in tracking are now in neatly, consecutively numbered jail cells. Being found guilty
of being the prime numbered addresses means being locked up in correspondence with the counting
numbers a second time in terms of jail cells.

They must once again have the same cardinality since there really are infinite primes and we are
deleting them to a genuinely simple scheme. So there have to be a countably infinite number of cells
to house the countably infinite detainees.

Now a Prime Lawyer comes along and says there's been a breach of the law because the arrest warrant
called for arrest of all only doubly primed primes while the arresting officer was asked to arrest all
primes at prime numbered addresses and that means he has arrested an infinite number of primes
which are also at least triply prime and are therefore not only doubly prime. And so, in order to sort
out this miscarriage of mathematical justice, all of the prime numbers now living in prime numbered
jail cells have their cell doors opened and are told to assemble in ascending numerical order for
inspection and release. And so the sieve is applied again, a third time, this time note that it has been
applied to the cell numbers of the various inmates. All the prime numbered cells contain prisoners
who were at least triply prime, and thus are cleared of being only doubly prime.

All the singularly prime numbers still live in Prime Lane. All the doubly primed numbers are still locked
in cells and all triply prime numbers or higher are due for release.

So, an infinite subset of the infinite inmates are released and, as recompense for false arrest, they are
taken to a holding facility for higher order primes and will be given larger homes, all in the same
infinitely long street and this bold new housing development, on prime real estate of course, is called
Triply Prime Crescent.

Once again the obvious rule applies that we list these former inmates from smallest prime to ever
larger primes and the smallest triply prime number lives at 1 Triply Prime Crescent. The next smallest
prime to be released from Doubly Prime Jail lives at 2 Triply Prime Crescent and so on. Once again you
set up a correspondence between the primes that are left after several sieves and street addresses
and lo, you have another infinitely long crescent packed with the infinitely many primes that remain.

It is not remotely hard to prove that this repeated, looped sieving process must go on indefinitely.
Sieving primes using the prime sieve recursively does not ever end because you can always set up
another correspondence between 1) the primes that remain after the sieve has acted however many
times you please and 2) the counting numbers in the form of a street addresses or numbered jail cells
or what have you. There are always an infinite number of primes left after any sieve is the point, so
you can apply the sieve infinitely many times.

It is quite a remarkable thing to think about subtracting infinities from infinities any finite number of
times only to have an infinite number of objects left. That is what we are looking at.

I think of each application of a sieve as creating a new generation of primes. Here we have put each
generation into a new street or a jail. So, Prime Lane contains only first generation primes, it also
contains every first generation prime. The jail contains all second generation primes and only second
generation primes. As we left things Triply Prime Crescent contains all third and higher generations of
primes so that it will also contain fourth and fifth and ten billionth generation primes. If we sieved
Triply Prime Lane by address it would remove all those unwelcome higher order primes and leave only
third generation primes. Using my own preferred terminology, we have found that we will need an
infinite number of generations to find a generation for every single prime. That is also to say, no matter
how many times we repeatedly apply the sieve, we find we have to keep applying it because we don’t
ever run out of primes to sieve.

After a trillion trillion trillion trillion applications of the sieve, we’re not even close to removing all of
the primes. There will be as many primes left as there were after the first sieve because each
generation has the same cardinality. It’s a very strange thought but this is what it means to have an
infinite number of primes, it means an infinite number of generations would be needed to locate every
possible prime at a specific address in this lane or that crescent, this road or that jail cell.

Note that a generation and the primes in a generation are not ‘one to one’. You give me a prime and
I can locate its generation by simply sieving repeatedly until it gets deleted. You give me the generation
of a prime though and you have only named the street that prime lives on so I have no idea which of
infinitely many primes you might mean because giving me a street name is not a sufficiently complete
addressing system. It is like saying I am thinking of a prime that lives in Doubly Prime Jail, which prime
am I thinking of? It is not the same problem as saying, I am thinking of the number 17, where does 17
live these days? I can give you 17’s exact address by tracking its travel itinerary. Imagine sending 17
mail and every place it has lived it has a mail redirection service. 17 is the 7th prime so it lived at a
prime numbered address on Prime Lane and we send mail there. It must be redirected because 17
really is the 7th prime and lived at 7 Prime Lane and was then arrested for that exact reason. So mail
redirection applies and it goes to the Doubly Prime Jail. Here 17 was housed in cell 4, being the 4th
smallest prime arrested. That is also where it stayed even when all the prime numbered cell doors
were opened. 4 is certainly not a prime number. So, 17 is still prisoner number 4 at the Doubly Prime
Jail and his mail finds him there.

Now for something curious which has the Wonderland kind of curiousness in the sense that it just gets
curiouser and curiouser.

PRIME FAMILIES
One thing that is very revealing is to look at how primes are removed as the sieve is applied over and
over. What emerges is a pattern of deletion of the primes and from this you can also consider what I
have started to call families of primes. It is this idea that will enable us to get a ‘one to one and onto’
scheme such that you give me the generation of a prime and the family it belongs to and now I really
can tell you what that prime is.
Before getting into the details, it’s worth maybe noting that we are going to ultimately find that each
family also has an infinite number of members and also that every prime is contained in one and only
one family. We will also find that this is another kind of correspondence which is also not ‘one to one’.
You tell me the prime and I can tell you the family. You tell me the family and I cannot possibly know
which of the members of that family you are thinking of. To get back to ‘one to one’ correspondence
you need to give me the family and another piece of information about the particular prime you have
in mind and that other piece of information is the generation it belongs to. So, if a generation is
analogous to knowing only the name of the street a given prime lives on, knowing the family it belongs
to is like knowing only the street number. Knowing both gets you a complete address.

So, for the simplest instance of a family, note that every application of the sieve deletes the smallest
number from the previous 'generation'. That happens because 1 is not a prime number.

So when we arrest the occupant of 2 Prime Lane, we ignored the occupant of 1 Prime Lane and we
‘lost’ the number 2 from what was left after the sieve. The smallest of the primes was lost right away.
This pattern always occurs because 1 is never prime. So, when only some of the incarcerated primes
were released from their jail cells, Cell 1 was kept locked but the door of Cell 2 was opened. The
smallest number in the second generation was dropped meaning the number 3 stayed in jail. 5 was
released and lives at 1 Triply Prime Crescent but will never make it past the next sieve because it has
the number 1 as an address. So the primes 2,3,5 all shared similar addresses in a sense, each had a 1
in their final address. If we forward mail to these primes, that mail rerouting will end up being number
1 at this Lane or that Jail.

I sometimes call these deleted primes whose final address is 1 Prime Lane, Cell 1 in Doubly Prime Jail
or number 1 on Triply Prime lane… 'pole position' primes for the obvious reason: they end up in a
privileged location in a sense. They all have the common property that they all made it through
consecutive sieves to the being the smallest prime of their generation. So anyone who ends up living
at number 1 is a pole position prime, they are in what I have called (tongue firmly in cheek) the first
family. Every member of the first family has a final address where their street/cell number is always
the number 1.

So, every time the sieve is applied you locate the smallest prime number left which was deleted by
the sieve and it was always in pole-position. You collect these 'pole position primes' and you can make
an easily ordered set out of them. This set will be infinitely long because there are an infinite number
of generations. What you find when you keep going and find a few more family members is kind of
amazing at second glance. You get this,

{2,3,5,11,31,127, . . }
Now what is so curious about this set is that each number in the set is also the address on Prime Lane
of the number following it. Recall that this was obtained by sieving and collecting the occupants of 1
Prime Lane, Cell 1, 1 Triply Prime Lane... etc. So we had no intention of creating this property linking
one member of the set to the others, yet it has appeared anyway.

I dare anyone to tell me that is not somehow a little weird.

So, indeed, 3 is the 2nd prime. 5 is the 3rd prime. 11 is the 5th prime. 31 is the 11th prime and 127 is
the 31st prime. So that's a pattern that just emerges from collecting primes which all had a similar
address. It also means that to continue the set we would end up having to locate the 127th prime to
find the next number. That next number would tell us what the following one is. So if you have a list
of primes and want to know the families, it is really helpful to know that the families will automatically
build themselves.

Whatever that next family member is, it will always give the location of the next prime in the sequence,
ad infinitum. So this is curious the family builds itself once you realise that you not only collected
deletions they turned out to have a very neat self-referential property. If you begin with a numbered
list of the first million primes, say, you know the occupants of the first million addresses on Prime
Lane, you also have the address book needed to construct a whole lot of the members from a whole
lot of different such families.

What is curiouser is that dividing primes into their families also gives you exact information about the
number of primes between any two of these numbers.

If 31 is the 11th prime and 127 is the 31st prime then there are exactly 19 primes between 31 and 127.
Breaking things into families has unexpectedly led to a new possible description of the primes which
contains a kind of statistical information. This is possible only because primes inside families are
always self-referential in this way. I think this is most peculiar and unexpected because all we actually
set out to do was use the prime sieve on the primes over and over again and we end up creating
families where the family is itself a kind of address book of related primes and they turn out to be
related in this whole other way that each entry in the family has the address on Prime Lane of the
entry just before it. Because they have the same prime DNA and know of other related primes I have
called them families.

RECONSTRUCTING A COMPLETE LIST OF THE PRIMES BY COMBINING FAMILIES

Now for a really fun trick. You look for the smallest prime not contained in the list above and you see
how it was deleted. That is the number 7. That was living at 4 Prime Lane and was never arrested
because 4 is factorable and the Prime Crime Inspector was a stickler for detail. As the fourth prime, 7
is related to (in the same family as) the prime who was the occupant of Cell 4 and whose cell door
never opened for release. That is the number 17. And the exact same pattern has emerged since 17 is
the 7th prime. You keep going and look for the 17th prime and that is 59 and sure enough, that is also
the character who now lives at 4 Triply Prime Crescent.

You can also add these entries to the other ones and so combine two completely different families
into one ordered set.

{2, 3, 5, 7,11, 17, 31, 59, 127, 277. . }

From which you can surmise very happily that 277 is the 59th prime and the next red term would be
the 277th prime. The colour-coding of primes is a nice way to preserve the family ties and thereby also
retain the statistical information about primes and where they are distributed and how many you are
looking for.

By colour coding, the addition of families into a set contains new information about the number of
missing primes. Looking for primes valued between 127 and 277 means we are looking for primes
between the 31st prime and the 59th prime, so that’s another 17 primes between 127 and 277. We
don’t know what those primes are, but we know how many there have to be.

Now the rule that we used before that every number in the set is the address on Prime Lane of the
number before isn't right anymore because we have combined two families and shuffled the elements
into an ascending order, but if we make allowance for colours as well, then the rule works again. So,
you can repeat the process of reconstructing the primes in terms of families and seek to locate the
next smallest prime not already on the list and reconstruct also its family ties.

That next smallest prime not already on our growing list is 13. It is the 6th prime and lived at 6 Prime
Lane.

And so, the associated family is {13, 41, 179, ...}, meaning if we had looked in Cell 6 we would have
found the number 41 was not released from jail because 6 is not prime. The occupant of 6 Triply Prime
Lane is 179. And so too the reconstruction of the primes now has three families and contains new
information which adds precision to the statistics of taking differences of primes.

{2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 31, 41, 59, 127, 179, 277. . }
So, for instance we know we have the 11th prime and the 13th prime because both 11 and 13 appear
in the list. But we do not have the 12th prime. That 12th prime must lie somewhere between 31 and
41 since we know that 31 lived at 11 Prime Lane and 41 lived at 13 Prime Lane. The occupant of 12
Prime Lane is unknown but the point being its value is definitely between 31 and 41. This is the
characteristic of twin primes when they are used as address books for primes in this colour-coded
system, they will all constrain a single prime and locate it between an upper limit and a lower limit.

We also know there can be one, only one and therefore also no other primes between 31 and 41.
Similarly we know there are 3 primes between 41 and 59 because we know that 41 is the 13th prime
and 59 is the 17th prime, i.e. we will locate the 14th,15th and 16th primes between 41 and 59. Because
all the families adhere to the same scheme of construction, each number carries colour-coded
information about its own family relationships, some kind of notational differentiation scheme is
needed to encode the slowly reclaimed list of the primes with the statistical information they have
always carried (but invisibly). That colour-coding scheme is useful to preserve the information about
the addresses of the primes we have recovered from deletion but eventually you run out of primary
colours of course and for longer reconstructions a more general notational scheme is useful in which
the family a prime belongs to is carried along by that prime and its order within that family is also
encoded into that prime.

And so we can number the families with counting numbers, they are countably infinite.
2
Pn1 = {2,3,5, 11,31,127, … , 𝑝𝑛2 , 𝑝𝑛+1 ,…}

So this needs interpreting. This names a set of primes according to the street number 1 and belonging
to various generations all of which end up having their mail redirected to number 1 this or that other
street. The subscript always denotes how many times the sieve has been applied and by not saying
exactly how many times to apply the sieve and letting it be some arbitrary number 𝑛, we can list all
the primes which receive their redirected mail at number 1 Something Or Other Street at some point
in the sieving process. So sticking in a number as a superscript is like knowing the street number,
putting a number in the subscript is like knowing the generation instead and knowing both street
name and street number always gets you to a very specific prime.

Below is the second family of deleted fours. It starts with 7, which is the 4th prime. So we are looking
at a superscript of 2 which reads as the second family and by this we mean all those prime numbers
having the number 4 as a part of their final address when our redirected mail reaches them. We can
add this extra layer of information into the superscript, the second family of deleted fours has two bits
of information, it is the second family after all and we might care to preserve the final address number
which is 4. So, the symbol, P𝑛2,4 , reads as, the set of all second family members of deleted fours, over
all generations, 𝑛, where 𝑛 is without limit. So, it precisely defines an infinite set of the complete
second family.

Pn2,4 = {7,17, 59, … , 𝑝𝑛4 , 𝑝𝑛+1

4
,…}

The next family is led by the number 13, this is the third family of deleted sixes since 13 is the 6th prime
and all members of the family have a 6 in their final address. So, continuing our superscript choice, we
should expect the superscript of 3,6 for this family. Again, each member of the 3rd family lives at
number 6 of Something Or Other Street and will receive their redirected mail at an address containing
the number 6.

Pn3,6 = {13, … , 𝑝𝑛6 , 𝑝𝑛+1

6
,…}
And the complete set of primes is the union of all possible sets like this, all the families reassembled
will make a complete list of the primes.

We could built a set from unions of the first three families and symbolically that approximation to all
the primes using only the first three families looks like this,

Pn1,1 ∪ Pn2,4 ∪ Pn3,6

Where ∪ implies a union of the sets in question. The superscripts can also read as an address (3,6) =
(3rd family, 6 Prime Lane). This is what it looks like to have a bunch more up to the sixth family of
deleted tens.

Pn1,1 ∪ Pn2,4 ∪ Pn3,6 ∪ Pn4,8 ∪ Pn5,9 ∪ Pn6,10

This rather ugly looking thing describes a six family approximation to the prime numbers using the six
smallest families. This gets you an approximation to the complete set of primes using six colours,

{2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 41, 59, 67, 83, 109, 127, 179, 277, 331, 431, 599, 709, … }
Which might look like a bit of a six colour nightmare at first until you notice that the colour sequence
starts to repeat, but only because it must. This six family approximation gets you all of the first eleven
primes and you can estimate how many primes you are missing from this list and that estimate isn’t
really an estimate, it is exact.

The real point here is, we don't have to continue to apply the sieve over and over again to find the
members of the various prime families. We can instead apply the sieve once and then number the
primes once with their address on Prime Lane and then we can set about using the primes to generate
their own families using that Prime Lane address book. That completely different process of using
Prime Lane address book to create families gets you the exact same results as would be obtained by
using sieves iteratively and working out the families that way.

You can construct families of primes all day long if you want. Start with a list of the first 1000,000
primes available online and you can spend entire days making families.

TWIN PRIMES
There is a well-known twin prime conjecture which has never been proved. We know that primes
often seem to appear in pairs of consecutive odd numbers. {3,5}, {5,7}, {11,13}, {29,31} and the
conjecture is that there are an infinite number of these so-called twin primes. Nobody knows if this
conjecture is true. It’s interesting to think about because as we have seen the primes can contain
information about the locations of other primes if they are colour-coded or organised just a little bit
differently than is usual.

Here we have seen that we have a tool to analyse twin primes a little. It’s not much to go on with but
it cannot really be wrong. We can also immediately prove the following.

Theorem: There is only one family containing both members of any twin pairs at all and it is the 'pole-
position' family. That is 𝑃𝑛1 = {2,3,5,11. . . } which contains the twin pair {3,5}. That only happens
because 5 is indeed the 3rd prime. No other twin prime can be the address of the other on Prime Lane
because twin primes are always next-door neighbours while all larger twin primes are the addresses
of numbers much larger than themselves (31 is the address on Prime Lane of the number 127) and
this problem only grows more dire as more families are added to the reconstruction of the primes
since we are adding ever larger primes every time we create a new family. Our second family had the
smallest value 7 and that is the address on Prime Lane of 17. The only family of primes able to contain
both members of any twin pair must be the pole-position family.

This makes 3,5 unique among all twin primes. They are paradoxically, the only twins of the same
family. All other twins must be separated into different families.

This could have significance for the twin prime conjecture. So, for instance, if someone could show
that each family contained at least one member of a twin prime pair somehow, then you will also have
proved the twin prime conjecture because there are infinite number of families. It is trivially true that
half infinity is infinity so if there are an infinite number of families there are half as many twin primes
as there are families and then it could only be that there are an infinite number of twin primes.

So far as it was pressed all of the new families were indeed associated with twin primes. If we look
back we see that this was the case in all instances thus far. In no way does that imply all families must
contain at least one member of a set of twins of course.

CODES AND CIPHERS

Families and generations of primes provide for endless ways to encode data.

We don’t have to care about computers and powers of 2 so we will say we have 30 different symbols
to encode and we should like to write messages using only these 30 symbols.

We can set the primes up in correspondence with the alphabet however we please. We can even order
letters so that we know this here thing corresponds to the letter a but we can also encode it in such a
way that we know this letter a is also the first letter of a new word. That kind of encoding is absolutely
possible using both families and generations to locate specific prime numbers.

So for instance we could say every letter inherits its own family. The letter a is the pole-position family.
The letter b is the second family which is the deleted fours the first member of which is 7 and so on
until we get to the 30th family.

To each member of that family we assign the same letter. So for instance, the second family begins

B = {7,17,59…}

To represent b at the start of a word we would use the number 7. If b falls in second place in that word
like abnegate, we would instead use 17. And so on. Every member of the family represents a letter in
a given place.
So for the band ABBA we would have A in the first place. The first prime from the pole-position family.
That is 2. We have B in the second place. Well that’s 17 because 17 is in the second place of the B’s.
But we also need a B in the third place and so we have 59. Then we want the 4th member of the pole-
position family because the fourth letter in ABBA is an A. And that is 11.

So ABBA = (2)(17)(59)(11) = 22066 and that is the number ABBA written in terms of prime factors.

Okay so run this in reverse. You have the number 22066. You quickly see a divisor in there of 2. So you
have 22066 = (2)*(11033). If you know how 11’s work you can see there’s an 11’ness about 11033.
What would you get if you divided by 11? Something a bit over 1000. It would be exactly 1003. So now
you have 22066 = (2)*(11)*(1003). And factoring 1003= (17)(59) you get back to (2)(11)(17)(59) =
AABB. That is the prime decomposition of 22066. But you look these numbers up in terms of their
family addresses and you can see that 11 is the fourth member of the A family and should be last. The
B’s are instead second and third family members so instead, after re-ordering, 22066=ABBA.

Now you can write a word in terms of families and generations using a single number which has a
bunch of prime factors. You have to take the number you end up with and find its factors. This is called
prime decomposition. You will end up with a list of primes. Each of these primes will belong to one of
30 families. The family gets you the letter and the position within the family gets you the position
within the word.

Here is the cool part. Every word you can write in this system corresponds to a product of some
number of prime numbers. Every word is factorable. Every four letter word contains four different
prime factors. Every five letter word has five different prime factors. Longer words are harder to
decompose than shorter words.

No word of more than one letter is a prime. Every word of one letter is a prime. That means that a
subset of all factorable numbers, can be decomposed into a unique word. No word is associated with
a number which has the same prime used twice. 8 for instance cannot be a word since the prime
decomposition is 2 x 2 x 2 and here you are trying to put the letter a in the first place three times. Any
number containing 8 as a factor cannot be a word for this same reason.

All of these features of words and numbers are just the consequences of how the cipher was set up.
That was completely arbitrary. This is only one rather unadventurous example of an infinite variety of
possible codes based on the primes and their families and their generations. Once you know the cipher
you only have to worry about prime decomposition of numbers and the assembly of primes into their
families and making sure everything is in the correct location. But it means you can locate real words
and you could, in principle, encode the phrase ‘I really dislike prime numbers’ into the cipher and it
would churn out five numbers, one prime and four factorable numbers, so I have four prime
decompositions to do. Then it is an assembly job.

I deliberately used a very boring cipher which connected the alphabet to the prime families in a very
predictable and organised way which was moderately easy to follow. It’s also got problems for that
reason, so for instance the common words always transcribe to the same number. Can’t be having
that. It is easy peasy to fix that by using a more sophisticated cipher in which, after each word you did
something to change the way 30 letters are assigned to 30 families. We chose the simplest way
possible which leaves the thing prone to deciphering by some unwelcome third party. You have a free
hand on how to do that enciphering so long as the person deciphering it at the other end knows the
scheme for linking letters to families, of course.
The point is you have to know how the cipher would work to have any hope of decoding numbers into
complete words. I chose the first 30 families, any 30 families will do. I chose to use the location of the
prime inside the family as the location of a letter inside a word. Why not have some fancy function
which says you square the thing so that if have b as the third letter we are looking for 3*3=9, the 9 th
member of the family and not the second. No reason to use the most obvious method, not when
subtle variations offer greater baffling effects for anyone trying to break the code by reverse
engineering the cipher.

Once you have a list of primes arranged into families, who cares which families of primes, you and
another person sharing that same list can use multiplication and division and tables of primes to send
secret messages. The tables of primes are easy, you can copy and paste those from online. The hard
part is the cipher algorithm which allows you to slip between specific words and whole numbers
uniquely associated with those words.

22066 = ABBA isn’t some joke, it’s a real thing, we are turning strings of letters into specific numbers
using primes divided now into their own natural families and we are doing this in such a way that it
allows for the complete reconstruction of words from the numbers. Not just the letters but the
ordering of the letters is retained information. Given the cipher we started with, 22066 can only mean
ABBA and the only word 22066 can possibly form is ABBA.

This is a prime cipher equivalent of what is called the fundamental theorem of arithmetic: all
factorable numbers have a unique prime decomposition. This combined with what I think of as the
families of primes structure, the heredity of primes, the relationships they build, that combination of
the fundamental theorem of algebra and the families is what is really driving our ability to say okay
every particular word encodes to a very particular number and this process is actually reversible, but
only once you know the way letters are being enciphered into numbers. It has to be a reversible
process or you end up with two words equalling the same number which is not good for messaging.
So our code is one to one and onto, it is nicely bijective like all respectable enciphering schemes. It is
just the more precise way of saying I give you a number you can give me back a specific word. I give
you a specific word you can give me its specific number.

ON THE USELESSNESS OF PURE MATHEMATICS

Now you might well say, look that is all well and good Bart but what use is it? Why should anyone
care? Well nobody should care. It has no known application. Even as a cipher it is a poor form of code
because it contains all these self-referential parts which would, in principle, offer a way into
deciphering it.

The only real use it has at this point is pure recreational entertainment and an intellectual distraction
set aside for an otherwise dull day. For some people, a small minority to be sure, such intellectual
pleasures such as finding these self-referential patterns lurking inside the primes is like climbing for
the peak of Mount Satisfaction. For those with the eyes to see, this self-referential relationship
between the primes is only possible because the primes have this latent self-referencing system
already built in. That is to say there is no way that creating a generation of primes could involve self-
referencing unless that was already a built-in feature of each prime family. Families were not
constructed so as to be self-referential they were simply a product of a sieves applied iteratively but
it just so happened that when this was done a self-referential property of the primes stood out all of
a sudden and it was possible to write out a list of primes in terms of families, a list which was colour-
coded by family and preserved the familial, statistical information about where other primes would
be located.

This relationship whereby one process is used to generate something and it is found that this process
also inherits another totally unexpectedly neat property is typical of all the most distracting pure
mathematics. By pure mathematics I mean what is always meant by that term, pure mathematics has
no known application to the real physical world, it is mathematics done only for its own sake. If applied
mathematics is the mathematics which has a well-known and well-loved application to the real world,
pure mathematics is instead the mathematics whose only known application is to itself.

So I am tempted to apologise for not having a bigger purpose to put all of this to but I should also like
to remain unapologetic about the exact same thing in the sense that, as Robert Recorde once wrote,
mathematics is the ‘whetstone of witte’, by which he clearly meant that it sharpens the mind. It is the
view of pure mathematicians that mathematics for its own sake is a perfectly sufficient cause to
produce it and in that spirit I should not feel sorry that there isn’t somehow more to the story than
the story itself.