The Surprises Never Eend: The Ulam Spiral of Primes

Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1452301

This is just an optical illusion. The "structure" of primes is that they are the atoms with which we can build the natural numbers (via multiplication). There are just enough primes (and they occur just often enough) to do this.

My question would be, are there things analogous to primes in other types of number systems, particularly useful ones.

Which number systems are you referring to?

Even a deity who could create the universe couldn't make 4 a prime number.

Unless a deity made it a sin punishable by some horrible method of torture for believing otherwise. At least then you might reconsider your statement. But at least we'd know the truth about deities.

A little OT, but a solid argument for a relativist universe.

I didn't read the article but I know the Ulam Spiral. My opinion is it shows more about human perception and pattern detection (even in places where there are no patterns) than about regularities in the prime number sequence.

I think even the lamest pattern recognition algorithm would recognize those lines.

By the way, why do you comment on what you didn't read? (Although the article really doesn't have anything new to say.)