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    Ulam's Spiral - Article

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    Deepak Kamlesh
    This document describes Ulam's spiral, which was discovered by mathematician Stanislaw Ulam in the 1960s while doodling at a scientific meeting. The Ulam spiral arranges numbers in a spiral pattern, with prime numbers highlighted. It shows that prime numbers tend to fall along the diagonals of the spiral. This reveals that some quadratic polynomials tend to generate many prime numbers. When Martin Gardner wrote about the Ulam spiral in 1964, it gained wider attention by appearing on the cover of Scientific American.

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    Ulam's Spiral - Article

    Uploaded by

    Deepak Kamlesh
    6 views2 pages
    This document describes Ulam's spiral, which was discovered by mathematician Stanislaw Ulam in the 1960s while doodling at a scientific meeting. The Ulam spiral arranges numbers in a spiral pattern, with prime numbers highlighted. It shows that prime numbers tend to fall along the diagonals of the spiral. This reveals that some quadratic polynomials tend to generate many prime numbers. When Martin Gardner wrote about the Ulam spiral in 1964, it gained wider attention by appearing on the cover of Scientific American.

    Original Description:

    A short article about Ulam's Spiral including a diagram.

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    This document describes Ulam's spiral, which was discovered by mathematician Stanislaw Ulam in the 1960s while doodling at a scientific meeting. The Ulam spiral arranges numbers in a spiral pattern, with prime numbers highlighted. It shows that prime numbers tend to fall along the diagonals of the spiral. This reveals that some quadratic polynomials tend to generate many prime numbers. When Martin Gardner wrote about the Ulam spiral in 1964, it gained wider attention by appearing on the cover of Scientific American.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    Download as pdf or txt
    6 views2 pages

    Ulam's Spiral - Article

    Uploaded by

    Deepak Kamlesh
    This document describes Ulam's spiral, which was discovered by mathematician Stanislaw Ulam in the 1960s while doodling at a scientific meeting. The Ulam spiral arranges numbers in a spiral pattern, with prime numbers highlighted. It shows that prime numbers tend to fall along the diagonals of the spiral. This reveals that some quadratic polynomials tend to generate many prime numbers. When Martin Gardner wrote about the Ulam spiral in 1964, it gained wider attention by appearing on the cover of Scientific American.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    of 2

    Ulams spiral

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    As can be seen, the prime numbers (coloured red) are falling on the
    diagonals. This was discovered in the 1960s by a mathematician known as
    Stanislaw Ulam while making his way through a miserable scientific
    meeting by doodling on a piece of paper.
    The Ulam spiral consists of integers, starting from a given n at the centre,
    written in a spiral with the prime numbers highlighted or emphasized in
    some way. Here, we have n = 41.
    Ulam, initially did it for n = 1. He tried carrying out the process much
    further, and also tried different centre values, but in each case the primes
    would cluster on certain diagonals and sparsely populate others. Because
    almost all primes are odd, it is easy to explain why they would tend to form
    diagonals, but much more difficult to explain why they fall on certain
    diagonals.

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    Actually the prime numbers falling on the diagonals reveals the apparent
    tendency of certain quadratic polynomials to generate unusually large
    numbers of primes.
    When in March 1964, Martin Gardner wrote about the Ulam spiral in
    his Mathematical Games column; the Ulam spiral featured on the front
    cover of the issue of Scientific American in which the column appeared.

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