Last summer I explored several data visualization projects, one of which looked at the intervals in between prime numbers. Without any programming experience it was quite tedious to make all the calculations and drawings one cell at a time. This week I have gained the ability to parse large data files and extract the data from within, so I thought I would revisit this project and fully automate it. Below is a screen shot of the final image and a video of the program running. I will work on this more to add color and produce exponentially larger printouts, possible pushing the dataset up to one million prime numbers.

Frequency of Primes – Small Size from Noah King on Vimeo.

This is a visualization of the first 1600 prime numbers and the spaces in between them. The left margin of any colored block is one prime number, and the right margin is the next prime number. The width of the block therefor shows the space between the two, specifically the number of non-prime integers that occur between the two primes. The colors are automatically selected by the software to put visual emphasis on the largest intervals and to help visually identify repeating intervals.

Frequency of Primes – Medium Size from Noah King on Vimeo.

This is a visualization of the first 15,500 prime numbers and the spaces in between them.