[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> i like the idea of finding larger and larger prime numbers but i still
> dont know what this will do for modern mathematics....
i thought of a good reason to have enormous prime numbers:
we would use them to impress extraterrestrial intelligences, should
we ever manage to contact them. any alien civilization capable
of building receivers must understand mathematics, and since
primes are prime in every base, they would understand mersenne
primes too. they may call them something else, such as
freemblookum primes, but they would get it. if there is no
other way, in principle, to discover freemblookums other than
massive brute force computation, we might make a little game
of it: we send them the first 37, they send us the 38th, we send them
39th etc, and so the whole universe will watch the outcome of our
first interstellar intelligence contest... {8^D spike
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