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by excessive 2424 days ago
The first time I saw these, I thought it hinted at some deep insight into the nature of primes. However, after watching the following video, I think it just says something about modular arithmetic and rational approximations of 2 Pi.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK32jo7i5LQ
The video is only about Archimedian spirals, but I suspect a similar analysis would apply to Ulam spirals too. We really like to find patterns.
3 comments

The comparison to a spiral with random points plotted doesn't seem to be enough to show that this is a pattern in the primes. It would be interesting to see, say, a spiral with everything that's not a multiple of 2 or 3 plotted. Maybe the spiral of primes just looks like it has a pattern because it's a subset of that.
Yes, that's very much what the video goes into. For any rational approximation of 2 pi, say 22/7, you won't get lines at multiples of 2 or multiples of 11.
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