[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Dear All: > > There were several toasts, including two synchrony > with a couple of groups of GIMPSers in Germany who > stayed up late to mark the occasion with us, lots of > good food and drink, and of course conversation about > primes (mostly shouted, as Tied House was quite noisy > this evening.
Wow, that sounds like a truly spectacular evening! The Munich branch of the M39 party was much smaller, only Steve Harris and I were there (I had received an email of Siegmar Szlavik who said he would have liked to come but had an earlier appointment, but he thought a distributed party to a distributed project seemed a sound idea), but quite memorable none the less. We had lots gutes, herzhaftes bavarian food, even more gutes bavarian beer and spent the evening discussing lots of mersenne stuff, including a conjecture that no two gaps between successive Mersenne primes are both bigger than 2 in terms of exponent ratio. M39 just fits that conjecture, 6972593/3021377 ~= 2.31, 13466917/6972593 ~= 1.93. Actually, Steve mentioned earlier on the list that he'd be surprised if M39 was higher than M13945xxx, so M39 was remarkably well "on schedule"! We also discovered that we had gotten the zime zone conversion all wrong, 7pm pacific time is not 1am in munich, but 3am. But not much harm done here, as we were still at the pub at 3am. And at 4am. > So it turned out to be rather a legendary gathering - > thanks to all those who attended, and also to Scott > for generously picking up the tab for the whole thing. > It was nice to put some actual faces to the names of > some of one's fellow GIMPSers! We had a picture taken too, but we've got to get it developed first and check that it's not too embarassing (we'd been at the pub for, what, 6 hours? when it was taken) before we put it on the net for the world to see ;) So, thanks, Steve, and thanks, all of the Mersenne researching world for one great evening. Just one more little thing: can you put some captions to some of the pictures on the net, so us who haven't been there can figure out who is who? I recognise only very few of the attendees and sure would like to know faces to some of the frequent posters names on the list, too. Alex _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
