[ExI] mersenne primes again

[Gordon Swobe]

Fascinating, spike.

I wonder if anyone has done a statistical analysis of the series to determine if the perceived change has statistical significance. Any idea?

A statistician should find it possible to say something like "The slope deviated at Mersenne prime number 38, and we know this with x% confidence." 

(Statistical significance generally requires an x equal to or greater than 95.)

-gts


--- On Tue, 3/30/10, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

From: spike <spike66 at att.net>
Subject: [ExI] mersenne primes again
To: "'ExI chat list'" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Date: Tuesday, March 30, 2010, 10:57 PM



 
Non-math fans, do 
hit the delete key quickly, thanks.
 
If you wonder what 
is making Mersenne prime people crazy as hell these days, consider this 
graph.  On the horizontal is the sequential number of the Mersenne prime; 
observe there are 47 known now.  On the vertical is the natural log of 
the exponent: the first Mersenne prime is 2^2-1 so the first y is ln(2) or 
about 0.693, the second is 2^3-1, so ln(3) etc.  
 
The more or less 
log-linear relationship held for over 500 years, then in 2003 for some very odd 
reason which is still way beyond my (or anyone else's) ability to explain, the 
last 8 of the known Mersennes clustered, they went off on a completely new 
trajectory.  Isn't nature weird?
 
 

-----Inline Attachment Follows-----

_______________________________________________
extropy-chat mailing list
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat