Ulam Spiral

The Ulam Spiral is a pattern of prime numbers discovered by a mathematician while doodling.

In 1963, mathematician Stanislaw Ulam was doodling on a scrap paper during a "long and very boring paper" at a science meeting when he realized that he had created a method to graph prime numbers that revealed a pattern.

(Left) Ulam started by writing a grid of numbers, starting with 1 at the center and spiraling out
(Center) He selected only the prime numbers and noticed that many of them form diagonal lines (Right) An Ulam spiral of size 200 x 200, with black dots representing the prime numbers. Did you notice the high number of diagonal lines?


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