Number Spiral

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:31:56 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

1. Introduction

Number spirals are very simple. To make one, we just write the non-negative integers on a ribbon and roll it up with zero at the center.

The trick is to arrange the spiral so all the perfect squares (1, 4, 9, 16, etc.) line up in a row on the right side:

If we continue winding for a while and zoom out a bit, the result looks like this:

If we zoom out even further and remove everything except the dots that indicate the locations of integers, we get the next illustration. It shows 2026 dots:

Let's try making the primes darker than the non-primes:

The primes seem to cluster along certain curves. Let's zoom out even further to get a better look. The following number spiral shows all the primes that occur within the first 46,656 non-negative integers. (For clarity, non-primes have been left out.)

On the next few pages of this website, we'll investigate these patterns and try to make sense out of them

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Number Spiral