Probabilistic number theory is a subfield of number theory, which explicitly uses probability to answer questions of number theory. One basic idea underlying it is that different prime numbers are, in some serious sense, like independent random variables. This however is not an idea that has a unique useful formal expression.
The founders of the theory were Paul Erdős, Aurel Wintner and Mark Kac during the 1930s, one of the most intense periods of investigation in analytic number theory. The Erdős–Wintner theorem and the Erdős–Kac theorem on additive functions were foundational results.
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Famous quotes containing the words number and/or theory:
“Among a hundred windows shining
dully in the vast side
of greater-than-palace number such-and-such
one burns
these several years, each night
as if the room within were aflame.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“The weakness of the man who, when his theory works out into a flagrant contradiction of the facts, concludes “So much the worse for the facts: let them be altered,” instead of “So much the worse for my theory.””
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)