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The old saw about real estate says that the most important features are location, location, location. Mathematicians care about location too, such as the location of the prime numbers. Prime numbers, divisible only by themselves and 1, have several uses, most popularly in the encryption that guards our Internet transactions. Consequently, we are always on the lookout for new ones, which is a challenge because they don’t follow a simple pattern. We don’t know an algebra equation we can solve or plug-n-chug to produce them all. They are irregularly spaced; if you ‘walked’ the number line to find one, you might go a thousand numbers without finding one, then find two separated by just one other number. Finding new prime numbers can be newsworthy, especially when you find the biggest prime number yet.
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