Images Created from Prime Numbers
There’s a great scene in the end of the book “Contact” by Carl Sagan where the main character uses super powerful computers to find a raster image of a circle hidden deep in the digits of pi. This is supposed to be a moment of deep spiritual significance.<p>But in fact, it’s basically an expected outcome given what we think we know about pi.<p>At first glance these images were startling to me; that such recognizable images could be “hidden” in the primes... in the very structure of mathematics! But then I realized that with an infinite numbers of primes available to us, nothing is hidden. It’s more like the primes are simply building blocks for us to use in constructing images of whatever we want.