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Primes are numeric celebrities: they're used in movies, security codes, puzzles, and are even the subject of forlorn looks from university professors. But mathematicians delight in finding the first 20 billion primes, rather than giving simple examples of why primes are useful and how they relate to what we know. Somebody else can discover the "largest prime" -- today let's share intuitive insights about why primes rock: * Primes are building blocks of all numbers. And just like in chemistry, knowing the chemical structure of a material helps understand and predict its properties. * Primes have special properties like being difficult to determine (yes, even being difficult can be a positive trait). These properties have applications in cryptography, cycles, and seeing how other numbers multiply together.