

Why You Should Be Excited About the New Record for the Largest Prime Number - ColinWright
http://mobile.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/05/curtis_cooper_has_found_the_new_largest_prime_number.html?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=t.co&original_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.snsanalytics.com%2Fa2lty4

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StavrosK
Can someone summarize? All I got out of it is "you should be excited because,
even though it's nearly insignificant, it's one more data point in some
statistical distribution we're trying to sample more of".

I'm not sure how "it's not very exciting, but we're doing it for a greater,
also-not-very-exciting purpose" should excite me.

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pbhjpbhj
I think you're pretty close to it. The last line seems a reasonable summary
though:

>" _Just finding one large prime number is a fun puzzle to have solved, but it
doesn't say anything basic about how the world works. The patterns behind the
primes, however, both proven patterns and ones only suspected, are the lens
through which humanity can apprehend deep and unfamiliar truths about how
reality is structured._ " //

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StavrosK
Right, that was where I got my summary from too, I just wanted to know if I
missed something and am being too critical. Thanks for the clarification!

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stcredzero
_> Curtis Cooper of the University of Central Missouri moved one small step
closer to Euclid’s infinity_

Within the first paragraph, the author displays ignorance of math that every
Korean high school student knows.

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ibotty
that's a figure of speech.

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TobbenTM
Non-mobile URL:
[http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/05/curtis_co...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/05/curtis_cooper_has_found_the_new_largest_prime_number.html)

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vog
The mobile version loads fast and is more readable on the PC. Why would anyone
want to visit the "non-mobile" version?

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nollidge
I might agree if the text wasn't so wide (edit: on my screen, at least).
Longer lines are less readable because you can't easily find the next line
when your eye flicks back to the left after finishing a line.

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ColinWright
I use a narrow window, then I can scan the page down the middle reading all of
the text as I go. Much faster and more convenient.

I also turn off the image to avoid the disruption. For me, reading the mobile
version is much to be preferred.

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SeanLuke
> The new number has 17,425,170 digits—just writing them down makes for a
> 22.45-megabyte text file

Um, what?

Even if you include commas... um, what?

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SixteenBlue
If you include commas that's 23,233,560 characters, which would be 22.15
megabytes (at one byte per char). Maybe 22.45 is just a typo?

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nicktelford
There are line breaks at a fixed interval so that it wraps at 80 chars. I
imagine that makes up the other ~300KB.

Edit: Line-breaks do indeed make up the bulk of the overhead, but it's also an
HTML page so there's some boilerplate markup at the beginning and end of the
file.

