Saturday, July 7, 2018

The popularity of my paper on the bias in the distribution of primes keeps on growing

The interest in this paper continues to grow.

At least, as measured by the number of its downloads from the viXra site, which hosts the paper in question, "Statistical Bias in the Distribution of Prime Pairs and Isolated Primes." The number of the downloads has now reached 30.


The paper was originally posted there on 4/27/2018. Note that 4/27 is 2^2/3^3, but I did not really chose to post it on a special day like that. Still, it's easier to remember this date that way.

It is probably safe to predict that the number of downloads of this paper will reach 50 by the end of 2018. 

With 30 downloads so far, it's already the most popular of my papers posted on viXra.org this year despite being the newest of them. It stands a chance to become the most popular of all my papers there given some time; say, by the end of 2020. 

To be honest, my other papers there are of little consequence in a grander scheme of things, that's why they all are entitled "A note on ... ." Just mere notes on what can probably be fittingly described as mathematical curiosities of one kind or another. Nothing wrong with that per se, but they add very little to mathematics, and have never meant to be published anywhere else.     

The paper on the bias in the distribution of primes is different, though, as being about rather large and overlooked an effect in the distribution of a very important class of natural numbers.

The most popular papers on viXra (at least when it to comes to number theory, which interests me most) are not necessarily groundbreaking, but, as you can easily verify for yourself, those dealing with the Riemann Hypothesis, simpler proofs of the Fermat Last Theorem, proofs of the Collatz Conjecture, anything to do with Pi or Golden Ratio, etc. In other words, papers dealing with popular, attractive topics rather than concerned with novel phenomena as is the case for my paper.

Needless to say, because of this bias towards hard to prove conjectures that can really be only appreciated by professionals with many years of study and a good background in mathematics, viXra has a reputation for attracting crackpots, but that does not mean that everything that gets posted there should be dismissed by default. I like to judge things on their individual merits. I may not be in the majority in this regard, but that suits me just fine as I tend to be a contrarian by nature.

Besides attracting crackpots, viXra stands out in yet another way: it draws the hate of elitists and people quick to judge by appearances often referred to as bigots. I suspect that there is a large overlap between these two groups. Since such people elicit in me a full spectrum of only negative reactions, the fact they hate it, makes me even more supportive of it. Overall, I think that "viXra is a good thing"  - thanks Martha Stewart!

Incidentally, I recently managed to submit my paper to arXiv, a much more popular e-print repository than viXra and seen as more respectable. That took some time. Despite starting my submission efforts about the time I posted the first version of the paper to viXra, I fully succeeded only in early July. The requirement of securing at least one endorsement from a professional researcher with a right to serve as an arXiv endorser can be a bit of an annoying obstacle, but once you overcome it, you feel vindicated in the value of your paper. 

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