emlyn / optimised-primes

Jupyter notebook exploring simple prime generating algorithms

Optimised Primes

There's more to them than meets the eye.
                                          — Optimus Prime

A Jupyter (Python) notebook exploring a few simple prime generating algorithms in an interactive slideshow.

Viewing

The easiest way is to just view a pre-generated version of the slideshow or notebook. However, you won't be able to evaluate any code yourself.

Slides

A static version of the slides, with pre-generated plots, is viewable here.

Notebook

Alternatively, you can view it in the normal notebook format on nbviewer.

Running

Online

If you would like to run the code yourself (and possibly edit it), you can run the notebook online with binder. It will take a little while to load the environment, then:

• Evaluate the first cell (by pressing shift+Enter or ctrl+Enter) to initialise the notebook.
• Press the "Enter/Exit RISE Slideshow" button (or press alt+r) to start the slideshow.
• Make sure you evaluate each cell in the slideshow (by clicking inside it and pressing shift+Enter or ctrl+Enter), as later cells will depend on previous results.

Local

You can also run it locally on your computer:

• Clone this repo so that you have a copy of the code locally.
• Run the pip install -r requirements.txt to install dependencies (this only has to be done the first time).
• Run jupyter notebook to start the notebook server.
• In the browser window that opens click on Primes.ipynb to load the notebook.
• Run the notebook (as decribed above).

Credits

The clever algorithm at the end (based on the Sieve of Eratosthenes) was found on a webpage that now appears to be offline. An archive of it is still viewable on the wayback machine here.

Timing plots are graphed with Bokeh.

Notebook is displayed as slides using RISE.