prime logs

3D Model

The colored cylinders have length log(p) for various primes, starting with p = 2: red, 3: green, etc. Each number n, from 2 to 22, has a prime factorization n = p1 * p2 * … * pk, so that log(n) = log(p1) + … + log(pk). This makes the prime logs stack up just right! See if you can read off the factorizations of various n’s from the picture.