Your assignment today, should you choose to accept it, is to typeset the largest known prime number, at nearly 13 million digits in length. So, what would be the best font to use for such a job?
The number’s length would depend chiefly on the width of the font selected, and even listener-friendly choices like Times Roman and Helvetica would produce dramatically different outcomes. Small eccentricities in the design of a particular number, such as Times Roman’s inexplicably scrawny figure one, would have huge consequences when multiplied out to this length. But even this isn’t the hairy part. Where things get difficult, as always, is in the kerning.
I read almost five years ago about the excitement surrounding the “discovery” of a prime number that was over six-million digits long, but now that has been topped with the unearthing of a prime that is made up of some 13-million digits.
Prime numbers make up the “periodic table” of numbers, the building blocks that combine to form all numbers. A prime number is a whole number divisible only by 1 and itself. Euclid in 300 B.C. proved that there are infinitely many of them (click for his beautifully simple proof). Still, that doesn’t make them easy to find. At the beginning of the number line, the primes seem to be everywhere – 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13… – but in the number line’s more distant reaches, prime numbers become elusive.
I have, by the way, referred to the number one as a prime, and I’m sure any mathematicians reading this will quickly call foul on this, but up until 109 or so years ago (109 being a prime…) one was still considered such a number.
Fascinating hey?
Apparently mathematicians the world over are celebrating the discovery of a new prime number. According to my mathematics directory, a prime number is divisible by itself and the number one.
How many primes do you know?
As for the newest member of the prime fraternity, it’s too long to bother writing out. It’s the largest such number yet found. I doubt (or is that hope) I will have much need to use it often, but it is a comfort to know it is there if I ever do ;)
