the solitude of prime numbers by paolo giordano

They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. “Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves. ― Paolo Giordano, quote from The Solitude of Prime Numbers When he imagined confessing these things to her, the thin layer of sweat on his hands evaporated completely and for a good ten minutes he was no longer capable of touching anything.”

Mattia thought that he and Alice were like that, twin primes, alone and lost, close but not close enough to really touch each other. There is a common conviction among mathematicians that however far you go, there will always be another two, even if no one can say where exactly, until they are discovered. Then, just when you’re about to surrender, when you no longer have the desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tightly. You encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of ciphers, and you develop a distressing presentiment that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true destiny.

If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. Numbers like 11 and 13, like 17 and 19, 41 and 43. “Mathematicians call them twin primes: pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching.

The solitude of prime numbers by paolo giordano