English

Jacob's Ladder: Prime numbers in 2d

History and Overview 2020-02-04 v3

Abstract

Prime numbers are one of the most intriguing figures in mathematics. Despite centuries of research, many questions remain still unsolved. In recent years, computer simulations are playing a fundamental role in the study of an immense variety of problems. In this work, we present a simple representation of prime numbers in two dimensions that allows us to formulate a number of conjectures that may lead to important avenues in the field of research on prime numbers. In particular, although the zeroes in our representation grow in a somewhat erratic, hardly predictable way, the gaps between them present a remarkable and intriguing property: a clear exponential decay in the frequency of gaps vs gap size. The smaller the gaps, the more frequently they appear. Additionally, the sequence of zeroes, despite being non-consecutive numbers, contains a number of primes approximately equal to n/log(n) , being n the number of terms in the sequence.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1801.01540,
  title  = {Jacob's Ladder: Prime numbers in 2d},
  author = {Alberto Fraile and Roberto Martinez and Daniel Fernandez},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.01540},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

17 pages, 12 figures. v2: Accuracy improved, new results included and references added. v3: Slight clarifications, matches version accepted by journal

R2 v1 2026-06-22T23:36:51.645Z