About Eric Rowland

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This channel is about beautiful and surprising results in number theory. I'm a mathematician at Hofstra University.

If you have a question about a video, please leave a comment! Unfortunately I'm not able to reply to every email. Thanks for watching!

A Bizarre Way to Generate Primes

There is a Fibonacci-like recurrence that generates primes! It was discovered in 2003, but no one actually understood why it was generating primes. A few years later, I plotted the primes in a way that reveals some hidden structure. This is a tale of logarithmic scale. ---------------- References…

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An Exact Formula for the Primes: Willans' Formula

Formulas for the nth prime number actually exist! One was cleverly engineered in 1964 by C. P. Willans. But is it useful? ---------------- References: Herbert Wilf, What is an answer?, The American Mathematical Monthly 89 (1982) 289–292. https://doi.org/10.1080/00029890.1982.11995435 C. P. Will…

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1 Billion is Tiny in an Alternate Universe: Introduction to p-adic Numbers

The p-adic numbers are bizarre alternative number systems that are extremely useful in number theory. They arise by changing our notion of what it means for a number to be large. As a real number, 1 billion is huge. But as a 10-adic number, it is tiny! #SoME2 ---------------- Notes and references…

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