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The Mystery of the Prime Numbers: Secrets of Creation v. 1 Paperback – February, 2010

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Matthew Watkins (Author)
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Matthew Watkins (Author), Matt Tweed (Illustrator)
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  1. Secrets of Creation: Prime Numbers, Quantum Physics and a Journey to the Centre of Your Mind (Volume 3)
    Matthew Watkins
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 362 pages
  • Publisher: The Inamorata Press (February 2010)
  • ISBN-10: 0956487904
  • ISBN-13: 978-0956487902
  • Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7.4 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,262,370 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 starsNot Just One Dumb Number After Another
By hrager on March 31, 2011
Format: Paperback
As the author explains, if you just keep adding one more number to what you have, even if you start with nothing, you can arrive at any number you want. (Except infinity, of course. This can never be reached, just because you can always add one more number.) The process of one dumb number after another is counting, and is the basis if addition. Here the author is talking about what he calls "the counting numbers." A curious thing happens as you start counting: here and there you encounter special numbers, the primes. Perhaps you were taught in school that multiplication is just an advanced form of addition. Watkins, with the help of Matt Tweed's excellent illustrations, points out that that it is very much more. You can arrive at any number you want, providing you start with something more than zero, and you must use the prime numbers. Looked at the other way around, any number no matter how large can be factored into one or more primes. It turns out that the primes, though there are an infinite number of them, become rarer as you go into larger and larger numbers.

So far so good; maybe you already knew that. There is much more, and it goes very deep. Did you know that those ever sparser primes locate themselves on a logarithmic spiral as they increase, that they cannot be predicted, but on the other hand follow certain patterns "with almost military precision?" That their distribution can be mapped as spiral waves and represented by harmonic analysis? All this and more with nary an equation, but a plethora of excellent illustrations and graphs. There is great mystery here, in these little numbers one after another. We know that numbers and math can analyze reality into quanta and waveform, but who knew that underlying numbers was a pattern of wave and vibration?
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5.0 out of 5 starsOn the supposed intractability of prime numbers
By Padmanabhan Sudevan on July 17, 2012
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
This is an outstanding and extremely well-written book which I would highly recommend to those readers who are curious about the nature of mathematics, and the structure of numbers. I had to re-read the book for this review, since I had read it some time ago when I first bought it. But it has stimulated me to go to the second volume in the series to see where Dr Matthew Watkins will lead us.

Watkins starts with simple intuitive ideas about ordinary counting numbers or positive integers, which of course are only a subset of the array of possibilities laid out on the real number line. While most of these possibilities (rational numbers, irrational numbers, real numbers, etc) have been studied in detail in the mathematical disciplines called real analysis and theory of numbers, prime numbers have perhaps been thought to be the most puzzling. Watkins begins an analysis of prime numbers, but proceeds to do so in a manner that is immediately comprehensible to the average reader with the usual meagre mathematical education and possessed of a certain amount of terror at the thought of anything more complex than doing simple sums. But he ends up surprising even those of us who have had some mathematical training. The text is studded throughout with lovely drawings by Matt Tweed that consistently add to the exposition, and is helpful for those, such as myself, who prefer to visualize mathematical concepts.

Starting with the idea of counting numbers, he proceeds to lay out the most gentle introduction to prime numbers, ultimately leading to the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic by about the first 100 pages of the book. This is the theorem that states that every counting number greater than 1 can be factorised into its prime constituents, i.e.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsA refreshingly new way of presenting math
By Wellsoberlin on July 23, 2012
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
The author and illustrator describe some of the mysteries of the distribution of primes, ending with Riemann's harmonic decomposition of the distribution. (If you don't understand what all that means, you will if you read the book and concentrate a lot). It is the first part of a trilogy which the author promises will culminate in a connection with quantum theory. I can't wait.

The most remarkable thing about this book is the presentation. You do not have to understand symbolic math. The ideas are communicated using many, many pictures and metaphors. For example, you have a number of apples and you can't arrange them into a rectangle (a row doesn't count as a rectangle) then the number is a prime. Technical terminology is avoided, especially when the terminology consists of ordinary English words with new meanings. So a prime factorization of a number is a "cluster" -- and of course it really is since the order the primes occur in is irrelevant. On other occasions he will use the technical term (for example "distribution of primes" but warn you against your understanding being contaminated by the everyday meaning such as "distribute two pencils to each student").

The author is not afraid of saying the same thing several times, using different metaphors and rewording. He will notice that some ideas will make you uncomfortable, such as the prime number theorem which "ought" to tell you the exact number of primes less than a number instead of merely estimate it. (How many of your teachers ever admitted that an idea may make you uncomfortable and this is why it does...Read more ›
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