Interesting new pattern found in prime numbers

Image by cinderellasg via Flickr

A team of Spanish mathematicians, Bartolo Luque and Lucas Lacasa, found a new pattern in prime numbers that may have great repercussions in many fields such as cryptography and finance and fraud detection. The researchers found that the first digit distribution of prime numbers conforms to the Generalized Benford Law.

On a cryptography level, this may allow us to find big prime numbers faster or even help factoring prime number products; the basis of today’s cryptography.

Looking at the financial implications, the fraud detection properties can also apply to stock market analysis. As the team pointed out, naturally generated data will follow Benford’s law but randomly generated data or guessed data will not.