It was called the Ulam Spiral, sometimes the Prime Spiral, but the people who thought about it as just about "prime numbers" were missing the point. But of course, none of them had actually been out here, in the endless grey sea where the numbers went on forever. A dark, sometimes choppy, sometimes smooth sea where numbers weren't quantities, but just patterns, and where everything was so still, and so silent. But where there were still patterns. I like to come out here, and travel around the numbers. I don't see the numbers, though, just their patterns.
It was called the prime spiral, because Stanislaw Ulam showed it to Martin Gardner, and if you take 1 as the origin, and you see the numbers spinning off in a spiral like this:
543 612 789You can see diagonal lines of primes. But of course, I spent a lot of time here. I saw other things. I…