Monday, August 22, 2011

The solitude of prime numbers.

Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves. They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers. Sometimes it seems they ended up in the sequence by mistake, that they'd been trapped, like pearls strung on a necklace. Sometimes I wonder if they would have preferred to be like all the others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they couldn't do it. Among prime numbers there are some that are even more special. Mathematicians call them twin primes: pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching. Numbers like 11 and 13, 17 and 19, 41 and 43. If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. You encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of ciphers, and you develop a distressing presentiment that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true density. Then, just when youre about to surrender, when you no longer have the desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tightly. There is a common conviction among mathematicians that however far you go, there will always be another two, even if no can say where exactly, until they are discovered. Twin primes. Alone and lost, close but not close enough to really touch each other.