Marcus Du Sotoy's book The Music of the Prime Numbers - The Search for the Solution of the Greatest Mathematical Mystery, translated by Uriel Givon, was published by Elit HaGeg Books, Yedioth Ahronoth and Seferi Hamad.
Avi Blizovsky
Marcus Du Sotoy's book The Music of the Prime Numbers - The Search for the Solution of the Greatest Mathematical Mystery, translated by Uriel Givon, was published by Elit HaGeg Books, Yedioth Ahronoth and Seferi Hamad.
The hero of the book is the German mathematician Bernard Riemann, who proposed a hypothesis to solve the ancient riddle: how can one determine when the next prime number will appear? Is there legality and order in the appearance of the initial numbers? And why is it so important? Sotoi tells the story of the brilliant and strange man whose influence reaches to this day in different and varied fields: quantum mechanics, cryptography, computer science and more. It is also the story of the immortal enigma about the multitude of brilliant and often the strangest characters who have struggled with it from then until these days and could not.
Riemann was a contemporary of Cauchy Langrange and Abel and in his doctorate, which he submitted to the famous mathematician Gauss, he provided ideas about geometry and its relation to physics, ideas that developed during his work with Weber. Riemann was convinced that fundamental questions in physics could be answered using only mathematics. The development in physics over the following years would eventually confirm his faith in mathematics. Riemann's geometric theory is considered by many to be one of his greatest contributions to science, and it will be one of the springboards from which Einstein will launch his scientific revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Riemann compared the prime numbers to music, which is not just a random collection of notes here and there arranged across the fifth. Rieman died at the age of 39 from tuberculosis, and his zealous housekeeper burned many of the documents he left behind, this is perhaps part of the reason that even things he proved remained unproven and therefore his hypothesis which he wrote seven years before his death remained a hypothesis.
Here are some excerpts from the introduction to the book, we brought the story of the cicadas on the Hidan website, and Aryeh Seter's article is attached at the end of the review.
Du Sottoy writes: "Nature is full of references to mathematical methods that man only discovered much later, for example Fibonacci discovered the series that bears his name when he observed the reproductive habits of rabbits - his model of rabbit reproduction predicted that in each new season the number of pairs of rabbits would increase according to A certain pattern. This pattern was based on two rules: each pair of rabbits would give birth to a new pair of rabbits each season, and each pair of rabbits New, there will be one season to reach sexual maturity. It turns out that Fibonacci numbers appear in different forms - in the number of petals in a flower, in the number of spirals in a pine tree, in the growth of a seashell over time and more."
"The formula by which Fibonacci numbers are created is based on a certain number called the "golden ratio" (golden ratio), a number that starts with 1.61803 and so on. The decimal development of the golden ratio continues until Bli Di without any pattern, like the number Pi. However, It has what many people throughout history have seen as perfect proportion, if you look at the paintings in the Louvre Museum in Paris or the Tay Gallery in London, You will find that the artist has often chosen a rectangular shape, the ratio of whose sides is 1 to 1.61803... Experiment shows that a person's height compared to the distance between his feet and his navel tends to have the same ratio. The Nth Fibonacci number can be expressed by a formula containing the power e -N of the golden ratio." ….
"Not only the Fibonacci numbers are found in nature. The animal kingdom also knows about the prime numbers. There are two species of crickets (cicadas) called Magcicada septands and M. tardes, which often live in the same environment. Their lifespan is exactly 17 years each , and 13 years the second. In all their years except the last they stay on the ground as they feed on the sap of the trees. Then In their last year, they molt into adults and emerge together from the ground. This is an unusual event, because every 17 years the septands take over the entire forest. They molt, mate, and die six weeks later More. The forest falls silent for another 17 years."
"But why did each species choose a prime number of years as the length of its life? First, they will appear together in the same year only once in 221 years, compared to more times if any non-prime number of years appeared. The prime numbers 13 and 17 On the other hand, the two species of crickets are allowed to avoid unnecessary competition. Another explanation is that a fungus developed at the same time as the crickets. The fungus is poisonous to crickets, so they developed a life cycle To keep them away from her.... For the crickets, the prime numbers were not just an abstract curiosity but a key to survival."
