Talk:Prime number

Carl Pomerance quote

...describing Joint Math Meetings (January, 1997) San Diego: the following is the original Carl Pomerance communication copied from the web site of Matthew R. Watkins, University of Exeter, for future reference

http://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin/kac-pomerance.txt

Gerry Myerson brought these remarks of Carl Pomerance to my attention in February 2008:

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There is another lesser-known "quote" of Erdos that I know first-hand he did not say, since I made it up! Shortly after Erdos died, Ron Graham organized an impromptu session of remembrance at the Joint Math Meetings in San Diego in January 1997. I gave a talk about Erdos and number theory, and I tried to explain how marvelous the Erdos--Kac theorem is. I had a slide:

Einstein: "God does not play dice with the universe."

I then said orally: "I would like to think that Erdos and Kac replied..." and then had the slide:

Erdos and Kac: Maybe so, but something is going on with the primes.

In any event, even though I implied that I made this up, I said so orally, and it was not written on the slide. Somehow, the San Diego newspaper picked this up the next day, and attributed it as a real quote of Erdos (leaving out poor Kac). I've since seen this repeated as another coffee-like quote of Erdos. There's a trade book you can see on amazon about prime numbers, maybe the first hit you see there with the key "prime numbers", where this "quote" is paraphrased on the dust jacket.

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ELApro (talk) 02:45, 14 March 2018 (UTC)