"Why did Beckham choose the number 23 shirt? How is 17 the key to the evolutionary
survival of a strange species of cicada?" Prime numbers are the atoms of arithmetic
- the hydrogen and oxygen of the world of numbers. Despite their fundamental
importance to mathematics, they represent one of the most tantalising enigmas in
the pursuit of human knowledge. Mathematics is the science of patterns. Yet the most
fundamental numbers in the subject seem to have no patterns to them at all. They
seem scattered randomly through the universe of numbers. But by looking at these
numbers in a new way, mathematicians have discovered what they believe is the secret
to the way Nature chose the primes.