Merry Christmas

One Step Closer to Solving Sierpinski Prime Problem

The Sierpinski prime problem has been around for about 50 years.  The lowest known Sierpinski number is 78,557 and the quest is on to find the smallest.  After decades of effort, it had been narrowed down to six possible candidates: 10223, 21181, 22699, 24737, 55459 and 67607.

It's one of those "pure math" problems that sounds tantalizing simple to calculate, but requires immense computational effort.

After the announcement last month of the 7th largest known prime number, you can now strike 10223 off the list.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2113283-crowdsourced-prime-number-could-help-solve-a-50-year-old-problem/

Pumpkin Pi

Today, I came across one of our old Halloween pics from a couple years ago (2014 I think) that I thought I would share:

Each year, the kids typically get to design (and help carve) their own pumpkins, and I sometimes get to do one for myself.   This was my contribution for that year.   It was inspired by this old "Foxtrot" comic by Bill Amend:

Jealous much?

Prime Number Distributions

Here's an interesting article that was a hot topic around the dinner table:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2080613-mathematicians-shocked-to-find-pattern-in-random-prime-numbers/

Prime numbers (other than 2 and 5) must end in a 1,3,7 or 9.  Over the first few hundred million prime numbers, researchers found that a prime ending in 1 is followed by another prime ending in 1 just 18.5 per cent of the time instead of a more or equal distribution of 25 per cent.

My Little Archimedes

M had a to do a presentation for school on someone famous, and chose Archimedes.   Here's one of his props where he demonstrated Archimedes' method for calculating Pi.

Punishing Math Papers

For all of you XKCD fans and dad's who love a good pun:

https://xkcd.com/410/

Pi In Prime Time

If you're a fan of the Big Bang Theory (a "prime time" comedy!), it will probably come as no surprise that the show has lots of geeky math references. One that you might not have caught is that Amy Farrow Fowler's apartment number is 314.