Top all-time · #14822
Pepijn van Erp
Personal blog · pepijnvanerp.nlsciencewriting
Pepijn van Erp's personal blog at pepijnvanerp.nl covers science and writing. Since 2015, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 6 times, most often “Oliver Sacks’s Twins and Prime Numbers (2012)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link his articles on Oliver Sacks's case studies, including the twins who supposedly named large primes, and on divisibility by 7 as a walk on a graph.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Oliver Sacks’s Twins and Prime Numbers (2012)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-09-10
- /articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and-prime-numbers/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-15
What Hacker News says?
Are you referring to the hyperventilation technique? I ended up at one of his workshops randomly and tried that. It’s actually an old technique to increase the ability to hold the breath. The hyperventilation clears carbon dioxide from the system (hypocapnia). That’s what the buzz is. Never ever ever ever ever do this underwater or you have a serious risk of death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freediving_blackout#S…
Comment linking /2016/01/wim-hof-method/
on “One hour of slow breathing changed my life”Submitted Oliver Sacks’s Twins and Prime Numbers (2012) as a story · 22 points
HN discussionI liked your anecdote. It led to this more detailed analysis of the twins abilities to detect primes: http://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and-...
Comment linking /articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and-prime-numbers/
on “Divisibility by 7 is a Walk on a Graph (2009)”Submitted Oliver Sacks’s Twins and Prime Numbers as a story · 2 points
HN discussionInteresting, there seems to be a different Sacks (software engineer Robert Sacks) who devised his own Ulam-like spiral. Anyway sorry I didn't keep track of the pages I visited, but here are some of the search results I see now, indicating at least some time wasted exploring something that did not need to be explored if it had been clear that the story was not fully real: - https://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrw…
Comment linking /articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and-prime-numbers/
on “Oliver Sacks put himself into his case studies – what was the cost?”Yeah the thing about the twins calling out 20 digit prime numbers did it for me. Even allowing for the twins having some ridiculous magical ability to think up such primes, Sacks iirc claimed to confirm the numbers' primality by looking them up in a table of primes. Nuh uh. Added: ok, found a more careful description. https://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and...
Comment linking /articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and-prime-numbers/
on “Oliver Sacks put himself into his case studies – what was the cost?”
