From: Stephan Neuhaus <stephan.neuhaus@tik.ee.ethz.ch> On 2014-05-12, 18:25, jim bell wrote:
Also, I believe there is a rule that says that laws of nature aren't patentable. To the extent that primality is a law of nature, it shouldn't be patentable.>To be pedantic, primes aren't so much a law of *nature*, they're in *maths*. I'm not aware of any law of, e.g., physics that would depend on primes, but would love to learn of one, if one exists.
There is a long (and interesting, though I don't consider myself a mathematician) debate on whether "mathematics" was "invented" or "discovered". I tend to think of it as being "discovered", if for no other reason than I don't believe mathematicians have much choice about what the mathematics will do. (They have the same choice that all archeologists do, deciding where to dig, but they can't choose what to find once they start digging at some specific location.) Jim Bell