Kevin's Watch

The inspiration for this thread is an article in yesterday's paper. A new prime number was found. It has 7.2 million digits! It's 2 to the 24,036,583rd power minus 1. (Primes that can be expressed this way, as 2 to some power minus 1, are called Mersenne primes.) Biggest prime found so far. (Of course, there are an infinite number of primes, so they'll be finding another eventually. This one was found six months after the previous biggest prime ever found was found.) There's a Portland company that sells a poster displaying this largest prime, with all 7.2 million digits in one-point type.

Unfortunately, the article isn't easy to find on the online version of my local paper. I'm looking so I can post a link, because I know you're all BURNING to read it! But I'm sure it's somewhere on the net anyway. The guy who discovered it is Josh Findley.

WOW! What a useful piece of information. That should help me a lot in the future.

P.S. To complete the mocking of this post, I will say one thing... The people who spent all there time looking for this new prime number are so sad they should be shot.

No offense to you Fist. Your alright.

Well thanks for stopping by, Darth.

*cough bite me cough*

Just wait until we start talking about Fermat!!! YEAH!!!

Fist and Faith wrote:Well thanks for stopping by, Darth.

*cough bite me cough*

Just wait until we start talking about Fermat!!! YEAH!!!

LOL! Bute yourself Fist. On the ass.

Heh, my pleasure in stopping by. *Bows low* and... ...

What a load of useless pile of rubbish that number is...

Darth Revan wrote:The people who spent all their time looking for this new prime number are so sad they should be shot.

Actually, there are two guys involved with the "prime Number Project" spent an entire year surfing the net, where they found several web sites that caught their fancy. One site in particular especially caught their fancy; they located that site in early September lasy year. They spent hours and hours posting to the site, and to this day they are the top posters to the site. Then one day last week the Boss came in looking for his new Prime Number. So they gave him one; just made it up out of thin air and gave it to him. They knew that it was extremely unlikely that it would ever be checked, and even if it was, they should be fully retired by the time anybody wakes up long enough to publish it. Now, back to the Boss. He was so happy with his new Prime Number, he put the 'Dynamic Duo' on a new, even more prestigious project; this time with unlimited funds and a 5-year project timeline.


Oh, would you like to know the new project? We....errr...'they' have to discover an American word that rhymes with "orange". So, the moral to this story is that Tom and I will lhave about 100,000 posts each my July 2009, and shortly after that, Fist will be posting his very first "Deparrange" thread!

SWEET!! dANdruff, I can't freakin' wait!!!

dAN really isn't kidding. (Well not much anyway.) I have nightmares that revolve around the words "borange, storange, gorange, forange, dorange, porange, corange, zorange, yourange, worange, xorange, torange, sorange, chorange, shorange, plorange, phorange, blorange, chlorange, horange, jorange, korange, lorange, morange, norange, quorange, roarange, vorange, floorange" and so on. Screaming I think I was. Screaming. Oh will it ever end?

Why not just use "flange"?

If this were any more useless... It would be worse than my posts...

dANdeLION,
While you are at it, find an American word
that rhymes with SILVER!

Good luck trying, but finding an american word for anything could prove difficult (unless it's Aluminum, of course).

Fist and Faith wrote:Just wait until we start talking about Fermat!!! YEAH!!!

So what about Fermat and his theorem, Fist?

Hey, folks, nothing wrong with pure mathematics. It may be pure crap to people like us who have to make a living and pay the rent, but that's beside the point...

Matrixman wrote:So what about Fermat and his theorem, Fist?

Glad you asked, my friend, glad you asked! (read in the voice of the Tramp) Let’s review. For those new to all this, I’ll start at the beginning, and simplify things a tiny bit.

There are certain numbers whose square, meaning that number multiplied by itself, is the sum of two other squares. Take the numbers 3, 4, and 5.
3x3=9
4x4=16
9+16=25
5x5=25

There's lots of these combinations, called Pythagorean triples. An infinite number of such combinations, in fact.** (OH, next topic will have to be infinity!!! )

OK, now it gets tricky.

Around 1637 (which happens to be the year the first public opera house opened), Pierre de Fermat wrote this little note in the margin of his copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica:

It is impossible for a cube to be written as the sum of two cubes or a fourth power to be written as the sum of two fourth powers or, in general, for any number which is a power greater than the second to be written as a sum of two like powers.

I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.

Well!! As you can imagine, this caused quite a stir!! The square of 3 is 9: 3x3=9. The cube of 3 is 27: 3x3x3=27. So Fermat's saying that there's no cube that is the sum of two other cubes, and no number raised to ANY power higher than 2 that is the sum of two other numbers raised to the same power!!!

I know!! Isn't it amazing???

So where's his proof?? If he ever wrote it down, nobody ever found it!!!! So, for the next 350 years, people tried to figure it out. Professional mathematicians, brilliant amateurs, just everybody!! An award was even offered to whoever could prove it. (I can't remember how much it was originally for, but, iirc, it became less as the centuries went on.) One person would discover one thing, another person would add to that, and on and on through the centuries.

And, in 1993, Andrew Wiles became something of a celebrity by FINALLY solving it!!! Mind you, it was certianly NOT the proof that Fermat himself had come up with. It was based on WAAAY too many things that had not been thought of by Fermat's time. (Could be Fermat goofed in his "proof," and just luckily was right anyway.) But it was solved!!! Hooray for math!!!!


**These Pythagorean triples all form right triangles!

-A right angle has 90 degrees. Meaning it looks like the corner of a square.

-A right triangle is one that contains a right angle.

-The side of a right triangle opposite the right angle is called the hypotenuse.

-The Pythagorean Theorem says that, in a right triangle, a^2 + b^2 = c^2. (a-squared + b-squared = c-squared) So the sides of a right triangle can be 3, 4, and 5. Whereas 3, 4, and 6 don't make a right triangle.

Hmm... I tried to follow that, I really did, but you lost me shortly after the quote.

Well thanks for trying! OK, let's see what I can do...

25 is the square of 5. (aka 5 raised to the 2nd power. If I could do exponents easily here, I'd do it that way. 5^2 is another way of writing it I guess.)
25 is also the sum of two other squares: 16 (4x4) and 9 (3x3).

There are many other such situations (Euclid proved there are an infinite number of such situations, in fact), where one square is the sum of two other squares:
100 (10x10) is the sum of 36 (6x6) and 64 (8x8)
169 (13x13) is the sum of 144 (12x12) and 25 (5x5)

So far, so good, eh?

But Fermat's Theorem says that there are NO cases where a cube (AxAxA) is the sum of any other two cubes (BxBxB)+(CxCxC). It NEVER happens. And it NEVER happens with numbers raised to the 4th power (AxAxAxA), 5th power (AxAxAxAxA) or ANY power greater than 2.

Am I making sense?

And the funny part is that Fermat claimed to have a proof that people tried to figure out for about 350 years! The proof that was finally found, by Andrew Wiles, couldn't possibly be the one Fermat had in mind, since Wiles' used a TON of knowledge/techniques/ideas that did not exist in Fermat's time. Like I said, I'll bet Fermat did something wrong in his proof (maybe he realized that later, and that's why he never showed it to anyone), but happened to be right about his conclusion.

*Yawn*

Aha! It does make sense now, thanks

I'm embarrassed to say that it took me a few minutes to figure out why that new largest prime had to be expressed as something minus 1, I actually thought to myself "Why couldn't they just have shown it's factors multiplied?" Summer break must really be getting to me.

As long as you're clear on things up to now. I'll take a week or so off now before I discuss infinity. I want to make sure Darth is good and rested, so he can get as much out of it as he possibly can. It's kind of overwhelming the way he depends on me for all this info, but I'll do what I can.

Darth Revan wrote:WOW! What a useful piece of information. That should help me a lot in the future.

P.S. To complete the mocking of this post, I will say one thing... The people who spent all there time looking for this new prime number are so sad they should be shot.

No offense to you Fist. Your alright.

Well spoken like a true philistine, darth. Seriously, you should respect what other people find interesting instead of criticising it for being useless. There are some people who consider games like KOTOR a complete waste of time. I mean, what has KOTOR added to the world?

Ur-Vile wrote:Well spoken like a true philistine, darth. Seriously, you should respect what other people find interesting instead of criticising it for being useless. There are some people who consider games like KOTOR a complete waste of time. I mean, what has KOTOR added to the world?

Inquire of Fist as to what I said to him in some pms... That might set you right Then you'll understand, as he does, that I was joking.

KOTOR? What's it added to the world? An excellent game! What has it added useful to the world, nothing whatsoever.

What does philistine mean? Sorry, but being stupid has it's drawbacks... heh.

I do actually find this quite interesting, as I do A Level Maths... and have done this sort of thing before.