What is a prime, and who decides?
Some people view mathematics as a purely platonic realm of ideas independent of the humans who dream about those ideas. If that’s true, why can’t we agree on the definition of something as universal as a prime number?
Scene: It’s a dark and stormy night at SETI. You’re sitting alone, listening to static on the headphones, when all of the sudden you hear something: two distinct pulses in the static. Now three. Now five. Then seven, eleven, thirteen — it’s the sequence of prime numbers! A sequence unlikely to be generated by any astrophysical phenomenon (at least, so says Carl Sagan in Contact, the novel from which I’ve lifted this scene) — in short, proof of alien intelligence via the most fundamental mathematical objects in the universe…
Hi! I’m Courtney, and I’m new to this column. I’ve been enjoying reading my counterparts’ posts, including Joe Malkevitch’s column Decomposition and David Austin’s column Meet Me Up in Space. I’d like to riff on those columns a bit, both to get to some fun algebra (atoms and ideals!) and to poke at the idea that math is independent of our humanity.
