Talk:Prime number/Archive 4

message: Regarding the novel "Contact", would it be appropriate to add under Applications that it has been suggested that a sequence of prime numbers, being clearly distinguishable from background noise, would be a good way to catch the attention of ETI's?  For instance, a message sent from Arecibo as part of the SETI program encoded data in a 23x73 grid, using prime numbers to assist in any decoding.  Other proposed methods resemble the fictional alien signal in "Contact", prefacing a signal with a sequence of primes in order to say "hey, pay attention, this is information, not noise!", since it can probably be safely assumed that a species that has radio understands primes.  Would anyone object to my adding this application of prime numbers to the article?  -Kasreyn 12:44, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  applications 

message: /Prime/ numbers are of course of /prime/ importance - Was that really nessecary? :) --Thenickdude 02:59, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Huh?  ^_^;;  I'm confused  -Kasreyn 10:50, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  the first paragraph 

message: I'm removing the number template from the prime number page, because prime numbers are not apart of quantity or listed in that template. Is a template for integer sequences in order? Timothy Clemans 06:19, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I perfectly agree that it was the wrong template. Templates are nice if they take just little room, and have very relevant related links. Otherwise, a category at the bottom does a better job. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:09, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removal of Number Template 

message: Essay and discussion moved to User:BenCawaling/Essay. Gandalf61 08:35, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  About the incomplete totality of the set of all prime natural numbers 

message: I moved here the following comment by 68.38.126.159 from the article. -- EJ 04:46, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Formulas yielding prime numbers 

message: Hiya. I'm sorta new to this wiki thing, I've only done a few minor edits before this. I agreed with most of the discussion on Prime numbers in nature, that the cicadas bit was the only bit worth mentioning, none of the others were present in nature because they were prime, they were just coincidences. So I Copied the cicadas bit, twiddled it a little bit, and added a little bit explaining that not every occurence of a prime in nature is significant. I couldn't, however, bring myself to delete the link to the 'main article', since it hasn't been deleted yet. Should I? 
Or have I overstepped the mark here; should I have left it how it was?—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bumnut (talk • contribs)  08:03, 30 March 2006  (UTC)
:As I understand it, the GFDL requires that you copy (the relevant part of) the history of Prime numbers in nature to this talk page (or a subpage thereof) if you copied the cicada text.  If you had restated the information in the cicada text, then no acknowledgment is required under copyright law, and none is required here.  
:I could easily be wrong here, but I think that's what you need to do.  Of course, I've only be active here a few months .... — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 21:35, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Since the separate was article was merged and redirected, the history is still available in the history of Prime numbers in nature, so everything should be ok. Schutz 12:48, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

text: The content of the article was relatively well sourced; I don't feel comfortable adding assertions such as "this seems to have been proven false" without any source. Your claim may be correct, but I have reverted your change until someone can provide a reference. Schutz 20:09, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Primes in Nature 

message: I am going to remove the following "properties" from the list:
* Each prime number p > 3 is ± 1 (mod 6).
* For each prime number p > 2, there exists a natural number n such that p = 4n ± 1.
* For each prime number p > 3, there exists a natural number n such that p = 6n ± 1.
The first one says that any prime greater than 3 can not be a multiple of 2 or 3; the second says that any prime greater than 2 can not be even, and the last one is the same as the first one, so that they are all trivial, even written in terms of modulos. Schutz 12:48, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Properties

message: This notice was slapped on the top of the main article.

This is inappropriate, as articles are meant for readers who should not be distracted by editing notes.
Moreover the suggestion that the content of the article in question is significant enough to include in the article itself seems unsupportable. This is a curious property of the decimal expansion of an integer, and is of very minor mathematical significance. Decimal expansions in general are of little mathematical significance - certainly no more than many other bases - and their relationship to prime numbers is of no particular importance. Elroch 00:02, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The only reasonable thing to do is to create an article called truncatable prime. Trivia sections must die. Fredrik Johansson 16:02, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I feel loathe to do it, but to save the main article from an ugly pile of decimal numbers, it seems a good course of action. However, I think a trivia section with one line for each of the two numbers is reasonable to address the needs of people who are interested in quirky, offbeat facts. Elroch 16:19, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

text: I don't think it would be worth creating an article just for truncatable primes; I don't really mind having the trivia section (the illegal prime stuff fits ok in there), but the information on truncatable primes would indeed fit better in an other section, maybe a new one about "special primes". However, before we start adding new sections, this article needs to be cleaned up (there are way too many sections, sub-sections, sub-sub-etc); in the meantime, I think we could keep the truncatable primes under trivia. What do you think ? Schutz 19:23, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The thing is, there are countless types of "special primes" (see list of prime numbers for an incomplete list). There's no use even trying to add them all to this article. We have similar articles for probably hundreds of other special numbers and number sequences, so I don't see what the problem is with truncatable flavor in particular. Fredrik Johansson 19:48, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  So let's do it the usual way: have a summary section on this page called "Special primes", with a link to the main page on the topic which could be either list of prime numbers, or special primes, or whatever. I don't particularly mind if truncatable primes are defined on this page or not; however, if we do not have much more to add on the topic that what is currently on the web, we do not necessarily need a whole new article. Schutz 20:29, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Suggested merge of an article about the primality of segments of a certain decimal number

message: Interesting how the phrase "there is an ... number of ..." seemed perfectly correct to me (and presumably many mathematicians as it survived here a month) until it was just changed. Google suggests this choice is used about a hundred times less than "there are a ... number of ...", which makes it rather eccentric to argue for the former. Doesn't seem any reason why the grammatical rule should be different from "there is a herd of cattle in the field", where the common choice is the opposite one, but common usuage wins in what is not really a technical use of language. Elroch 13:01, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Grammar

message: Just wondering: how can there be an even digit in any truncatable prime?
:No problem if you are talking about a left truncatable prime, as long as the even number is not the last digit. To take a simple example, 23 is left-truncatable because it is prime and 3 is prime as well; the digit "2" is never considered alone. However, you are right in the case of right-truncatable numbers. All the best, Schutz 06:29, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Truncatable primes 

message: As I open the edit window I just see '' inside.
:To edit, say, note 2, find the paragraph in the article with that footnote number and edit that section. This might seem confusing but it has the advantage of allowing automatic renumbering of notes. PrimeFan 20:37, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  How can I edit the Notes section?