Till now the mathematicians tried in vain to discover some order in the sequence of the prime numbers and we have every reason to believe that there is some mystery which the human mind shall never penetrate. To convince oneself, one has only to glance at the tables of primes which some people took the trouble to compute beyond a hundred thousand, and one perceives that there is no order and no rule. This is so much more surprising as the arithmetic gives us definite rules with the help of which we can continue the sequence of the primes as far as we please, without noticing, however, the least trace of order.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Till now the mathematicians tried in vain to discover some order in the sequence of the prime numbers and we have every reason to believe that there is some mystery which the human mind shall never penetrate. To convince oneself, one has only to glance at the tables of primes which some people took the trouble to compute beyond a hundred thousand, and one perceives that there is no order and no rule. This is so much more surprising as the arithmetic gives us definite rules with the help of which we can continue the sequence of the primes as far as we please, without noticing, however, the least trace of order." in the context of "Opera Omnia, ser. 1, vol. 2, p. 241, as quoted by George Pólya, Induction and Analogy in Mathematics Vol. 1, Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning (1954) and by Pólya in "Heuristic Reasoning in the Theory of Numbers" The American Mathematical Monthly Vol. 66, No. 5 (May, 1959), p. 375." to mean that wisdom is timeless.