Saturday, November 29, 2003
29(prime number)/11(prime number)/2003(prime number)
Today's date consists of three prime numbers, and that's something that won't happen again until 2011 (I'm sure you can tell me when). So today it's time for some fascinating facts about prime numbers. Well, some facts about prime numbers anyway.
2) Prime numbers have only two factors, 1 and themselves.
3) Two is the only even prime number, and only one prime number ends in '5'.
5) There's no repeating pattern whatsoever to the sequence of prime numbers.
7) Every even number greater than two can be written as the sum of two primes (that's Goldbach's Conjecture)
11) A quarter of the numbers below one hundred are prime, but less than 6% of the numbers below one million are.
13) Stanley Baldwin was the last UK Prime Minister to have been born in a prime year (1867).
17) The prime years of the 20th century were 1901, 1907, 1913, 1931, 1933, 1949, 1951, 1973, 1979, 1987, 1993, 1997 and 1999.
19) The largest discovered prime number is 213466917-1, a number with just over 4 million digits.
23) Huge prime numbers may sound useless, but they're the key to modern computer cryptography.
29) There are infinitely many prime numbers, we just haven't discovered them all yet.
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