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Patented prime numbers
From: Georgi Guninski <[email protected]>
On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 07:56:50PM +0200, Stephan Neuhaus wrote:
> On 2014-05-12, 18:25, jim bell wrote:
>> > Also, I believe there is a rule that says that laws of nature aren't
>> > patentable. To the extent that primality is a law of nature, it
>> > shouldn't be patentable.
>>
>> To be pedantic, primes aren't so much a law of *nature*, they're in
>> *maths*. I'm not aware of any law of, e.g., physics that would depend
>> on primes, but would love to learn of one, if one exists.
>> Stephan
>Allegedly Riemann zeta function is related to
>physics, though this well might be just
>speculations (search the web for ref).
>It is more interesting to me if
>sqrt(-1), n-dimensional space, etc. are
>part of nature...
My understanding is that they are part of nature. Â If you think about it, to hunter-gatherer-level societies, negative numbers could be called "imaginary": Â There is no such thing as "negative-3 sheep", for instance. Â Nor is there a third of a (living) sheep. Â It was easy enough for people to divorce themselves from the idea of integers, or positive numbers. Â It was much more difficult to deal with "irrational numbers" (numbers which could not be expressed as the ratio of two integers). Â
Square roots were comparatively easy...as long as you were talking a positive number. Â Computing imaginary roots seems terribly difficult, until you express the number in terms of a real/imaginary graph, and voila, it's trivial again. Â I think that (e (to the power of (2 times pi times I)) -1) =0 Â was discovered at least a couple hundred years ago. Â It's been attributed to Euler, nearly 300 years ago.
And the various string theories proposed in the last 20 years require the universe to contain 10 or 11 dimensions, with 6 (or 7) of them wound up tightly, perhaps near a Planck length. Â (10e(-33)cm).
     Jim Bell
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