Mathematicians have taken a step forward in understanding patterns within the primes, numbers divisible only by 1 and themselves. According to the new work, the population of prime numbers contains an infinite collection of arithmetic progressions—number sequences in which each term differs from the preceding one by the same fixed amount.
For example, in the sequence 3, 5, 7, each prime number is 2 more than the preceding one. Another example of such a sequence is 5, 11, 17, 23, 29, in which successive primes differ by 6.