Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zelda-mazzy 954 days ago
It was a bit difficult to grasp at first, but it clicked after realizing it's all primes up to 37, not just 37. Kind of a neat fact, and I enjoyed reading this. Thanks for posting!
2 comments

I don't think that's right. My reading of it was that 37 is the median prime among all primes.
I think you’re both expressing the same concept :)

37 is the median factor, it doesn’t mean that 37 is the actual second prime of 50% of numbers. The OP probably missed “median”, I know I did

Original comment said "all primes up to 37" which isn't correct there's no point where 37 is being used as an upper limit
I think that was an intuitive and imprecise way of expressing “median value”, so that 50% of primes are “up to 37”
Im going off what the article originally said:

"We see that 37 is the prime where roughly half of all numbers have something less than or equal to 37 as their first prime! So we’ve proven that 37 is the median second prime!"

did the title change or smth?
> it's all primes up to 37

Can you elaborate on "it" in this sentence? What is "all primes up to 37", when you phrase things in an easier to understand way?

I can't tell if you're suggesting the word median is being used in a misleading way? But it's basically the definition of "median 37" that half your numbers are "up to 37".

I admit I read it wrong at first, but it made sense to me at the end of the article. So I don't believe median was misleading. My initial thought was, as numbers get larger and larger, the chance that the second most common prime factor is 37 so 50%, which didn't make sense because of how common 3 and 5 are. By the end I realized the function is taking into account the range of prime factors as an aggregate.

Now I understand that with enough composite numbers, the chance that their second prime factor is 37 OR BELOW converges to 50%, which is pretty neat.