Oliver Sacks’s Twins and Prime Numbers (2012)(pepijnvanerp.nl)
pepijnvanerp.nl
Oliver Sacks’s Twins and Prime Numbers (2012)
http://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and-prime-numbers/
4 comments
This is quite interesting and if in 1966 Sacks was encountering this unusual case of prime numbers in his patients, then this undoubtedly led to his life-long fascination with prime numbers, I suspect. He is well-known to have enjoyed a book on prime numbers published nearly 50 years later, The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics, saying "I could not put it down once I had started." I like to think that two autistic twins inspired in Sacks a life-long enjoyment of this area of mathematics; that random encounters that can shape your thoughts for decades.
It doesn't sound like Sacks had a "life-long enjoyment of this area of mathematics" from the article:
> Sacks mentions another algorithm to test numbers for > primeness. But his description only shows that he has no > real mathematical knowledge that matters in this case.
> Sacks mentions another algorithm to test numbers for > primeness. But his description only shows that he has no > real mathematical knowledge that matters in this case.
Enjoyment is different from understanding. Sachs career was all about studying (psychiatric) mysteries that were incomprehensible. It possibly gave him or fed his magical thinking, which can fly under the radar in psychiatry, but can't survive educated scrutiny in mathematics. He probably did love prime numbers, and discussed it with nonmathematicians who didn't see his mistskes.
Sachs's popular books consistently embellished reality to make a better popular read, and never really got called out on it by the scientific community , perhaps because psychiatry was rather unscientific --or rather pseudodcientific -- thought the early decades of Zach's career. Sachs wasn't exremely harmful in this respect (relative to the horrors of pre-21st century psychiatry, including the folder it gave to the rise of Scientology to prey on The mentally ill), but still provided more infotainment than education.
It is interesting that the author claims that getting a 37% guess correct a few times consecutively, in one measured attempt, is unsurprising.
It is interesting that the author claims that getting a 37% guess correct a few times consecutively, in one measured attempt, is unsurprising.