While conducting some experiments in Java, my project supervisor reminded me to seed each iteration of the experiment with a different number. He also mentioned that I should use prime numbers for the seed values. This got me thinking — why primes? Why not any other number as the seed? Also, why must the prime number be sufficiently big? Any ideas? I would've asked him this myself, but its 4am here right now, everyone's asleep, I just remembered this question and I'm burning to know the answer (I'm sure you know the feeling).

It would be nice if you could provide some references, I'm very interested in the math/concept behind all this!

**EDIT:**

I'm using java.util.Random.

**FURTHER EDIT:**

My professor comes from a C background, but I'm using Java. Don't know if that helps. It appears that using primes is his idiosyncrasy, but I think we've unearthed some interesting answers about generating random numbers. Thanks to everyone for the effort!