mathematically speaking

I have always found numbers with only two factors intriguing. Numbers like 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, etc. When I was in grade school, I’ve thought of them as something special, even when I didn’t know yet what they are. I was perplexed that big numbers (or at least big for me then) like 59 cannot be divided by any other number. I imagined having to distribute evenly 59 items and not being able to do it. Imagine sharing candies whose quantity is a prime number among your friends. Unless you have exactly the same number of friends as the candies, it will be an uneven distribution.

Although a lot of people, even some mathematicians, don’t like primes, they hold a special place in my heart. When asked to name a number, I would more often than not, name a prime number. Whenever I feel like betting in the lotto, I would choose prime numbers aside from the special dates of course. Ramil and I became a couple on a 7th and we got married on a 17th. As I’ve said in a previous meme that I’ve done, I love prime numbers.

Mind you, these numbers have quite a following. There are mathematicians who devote their lives to studying prime numbers. There’s an infinite number of prime numbers and the largest one so far is 2^^32582657 -1 - this means multiplying 2 by itself 32582657 times then subtracting 1. This number is so big, it actually has 9808358 digits! This number cannot even be written on a single blackboard. Lest you think that mathematicians are totally geeky, a human DID NOT find this number, a computer did. If you are interested in knowing this specific number, you may visit this page and be dumbfounded.

Whenever I reach the topic of prime numbers with my students, I always ask them…“what’s the use of studying prime numbers?” Most of the time, I would be answered with blank faces or someone giving an answer related to prime factorizations, GCF, LCM, and fractions. Math is everywhere, we use numbers everyday but let’s admit it what’s so important with numbers that only has one and itself as factors? These numbers are actually more widely used nowadays, they are used for coding. These numbers help keep our personal information secure whenever we use our credit cards and whenever we access secure pages over the internet. Specifically, they are used in cryptography, the study of message secrecy.

Well, if you’re still with me by this time, I guess prime numbers are not boring after all

Image from http://strix.org.uk