Speaker 1: Feart originals.
Speaker 2: This is an iHeart original. Would you like to go
Speaker 2: on a treasure hunt without leaving your house? Would you
Speaker 2: like your name in history books? Would you like to
Speaker 2: win fifty thousand dollars? Of course you do, and I
Speaker 2: know a guy who can help. Okay, this is usually
Speaker 2: where we'd play a sound clip from some interview. We did,
Speaker 2: but unfortunately the guy who can help win us fifty
Speaker 2: thousand dollars has been well dead for three hundred and
Speaker 2: seventy six years. His name was Marin Mersenne, and he
Speaker 2: was a friar, you know, robe praying everywhere, receding hairline
Speaker 2: that even God couldn't save. Merceinne used to teach at
Speaker 2: a little college in the city of Nevers, France, and
Speaker 2: he was sort of a big deal. The humble friar
Speaker 2: was a math genius. He famously wrote a book describing
Speaker 2: the physics of music, and he was pals with thinkers
Speaker 2: like Renee Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and Galileo Galilei. And while
Speaker 2: Marsenne was nerding out over math in the sixteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: he started talking about something weird. A prime number. You know,
Speaker 2: prime numbers, those numbers that can only be divided by
Speaker 2: itself and the number one without a remainder. Mersenne had
Speaker 2: found a prime number that was well special, one that
Speaker 2: was so special, so rare, that he bagged the naming
Speaker 2: rights for it. Mathematicians call them Marsenne primes. Today, finding
Speaker 2: a Marsenne prime in the wild is a lot like
Speaker 2: stumbling into Bigfoot. It's basically impossible. Only fifty one Marsion
Speaker 2: primes have ever been discovered. But there are more Marsens
Speaker 2: out there just waiting to be found, and thousands of
Speaker 2: people are on a mathematical treasure hunt looking for them
Speaker 2: right now. Whoever finds the next Marsenne will get their
Speaker 2: name in the history books and we'll come home with
Speaker 2: a chunk of prize money. But the big secret, the
Speaker 2: next winner could be you, And I'm going to tell
Speaker 2: you how. Welcome to very special episodes and iHeart original podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm your host, Dana Schwartz, and this is prime time,
Speaker 2: the Hunt for Math's most mysterious number. I will say
Speaker 2: that this episode did make me feel like I was
Speaker 2: in like eleventh grade again, having to be sure I
Speaker 2: understood what a prime number was. And I'm just so
Speaker 2: impressed by the people in the world who devote so
Speaker 2: much of their time and energy to just the pursuit
Speaker 2: of knowledge for knowledge's sake. It's something very wholesome and
Speaker 2: it made me inspire to learn more about numbers.
Speaker 1: Well, Dana as somebody who has a GIMPS account and
Speaker 1: does go on searching for prime numbers mers in primes
Speaker 1: in particular, I gotta say thank you, you know, because
Speaker 1: we do care about this.
Speaker 2: You're a hero, Sarin, you know what.
Speaker 1: I don't mean to steal any valor on this one,
Speaker 1: but thank you, I really do. I absolutely love prime numbers.
Speaker 1: I've written two papers and published them about prime numbers.
Speaker 1: I watch Burkhardt Polster from Mythology channel on YouTube. I
Speaker 1: watched three Blue, one Brown on YouTube. I absolutely love
Speaker 1: this and I cannot believe that we make this episode
Speaker 1: and this is how I hear about it. I was like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, Merson Primes.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm picturing one of our listeners being inspired five
Speaker 3: minding the next Merson Prime. Yes they'll get the prize money,
Speaker 3: but I think we'll share in the glory completely.
Speaker 2: We will absolutely have the glories, and that's really what
Speaker 2: this all is for. You probably learned about prime numbers
Speaker 2: in math class back in elementary school. Shout out to
Speaker 2: my fifth grade teacher, Missus Saban, if you weren't paying
Speaker 2: attention during the cold open. A prime number is a
Speaker 2: digit that can be divided only by the number one
Speaker 2: and itself without a remainder. Take the number three, for example,
Speaker 2: it's a prime number, so is eleven and seventeen and
Speaker 2: two billion, one hundred forty seven million, four hundred eighty
Speaker 2: three thousand, six hundred forty seven. So that last prime
Speaker 2: was discovered back in the seventeen seventies by Lenhard Euler,
Speaker 2: one of the most prolific mathematicians in history. Euler is
Speaker 2: just one person in a long line of math geniuses
Speaker 2: who have gone hunting for really, really, really big prime numbers.
Speaker 2: And the reason I'm pointing out his discovery is because
Speaker 2: Eiler's number two billion, one hundred forty seven million, four
Speaker 2: hundred eighty three thousand, six hundred forty seven isn't just
Speaker 2: a prime. It's one of fifty one known mersenne primes.
Speaker 2: Let me introduce you to a guy who can explain why.
Speaker 4: I'm George Waldmorton. For the last twenty seven years we've
Speaker 4: been searching for large prime numbers.
Speaker 2: George Waltman is a retired computer programmer, and he is
Speaker 2: the king of the Mersenne prime number hunt. In fact,
Speaker 2: when we met George over a video call late last year,
Speaker 2: we could barely hear him over the sound of the
Speaker 2: fans cooling his computer. Turns out his puter was hunting
Speaker 2: for a Mersenne prime. As he tells it, he's been
Speaker 2: obsessed with prime numbers for a long long time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's basically fulfilling up childhood dream. My dad got
Speaker 4: me interested in priding numbers back when I was seven
Speaker 4: or eight years old.
Speaker 2: When George was a little kid. His dad got a
Speaker 2: letter with a postmark that captured his imagination.
Speaker 4: The postmark had two to the eleven thousand, two hundred
Speaker 4: and thirteen minus one is prime. And it just amazed
Speaker 4: me that someone was able to prove that this three
Speaker 4: thousand digit number was a prime number.
Speaker 2: The number on that postcard was a Mersenne prime, and
Speaker 2: it contained the formula that makes finding a Mersenne prime
Speaker 2: possible two to the power of p minus one. I'll
Speaker 2: let him explain.
Speaker 4: That means you multiply too many, many many times and
Speaker 4: then subtract one, and if you're lucky, you've got a
Speaker 4: big prime number.
Speaker 2: Here's a simple example. Two to the power of three
Speaker 2: two times two times two makes eight. Now subtract one
Speaker 2: that makes seven. Seven is a prime, and since we
Speaker 2: can find it with Marin Marsenne's special formula, we can
Speaker 2: call it a Marsenne prime. Now, let's try it with
Speaker 2: a bigger number. Take two to the power of thirty
Speaker 2: one and then subtract one.
Speaker 3: You got it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's our old friend. Two billion, one hundred forty
Speaker 2: seven million, four hundred eighty three thousand, six hundred forty
Speaker 2: seven that's a Marsenne prime.
Speaker 4: Two.
Speaker 2: Now here's the tricky part. That formula does not always
Speaker 2: give us a prime number. Two to the power of
Speaker 2: four minus one makes fifteen, which is not prime. Two
Speaker 2: to the power of six minus one makes sixty three
Speaker 2: not prime either. Turns out, the chances that this formula
Speaker 2: will find a prime are low. Frankly, you have a
Speaker 2: better chance finding a needle in a haystack or dB
Speaker 2: Cooper than you do finding a Mersinne and a major
Speaker 2: reason for this is and I cannot stress this enough,
Speaker 2: because Mersenne primes can get comically huge.
Speaker 4: Currently we're looking for Mersenne primes of around thirty million digits.
Speaker 2: George didn't slip up there. Right now, he's looking for
Speaker 2: a number that is thirty million digits long. For perspective,
Speaker 2: that number is so big it would take me several
Speaker 2: months just to read it out loud to you. But
Speaker 2: right now, thousands of people are looking for that number,
Speaker 2: and if some and finds it, they will win three
Speaker 2: thousand bucks. But the fifty thousand dollars prize I've been
Speaker 2: talking about.
Speaker 4: That goes to anyone who finds a hundred million digit
Speaker 4: prime number.
Speaker 2: Now I get what you're thinking, Dana. I would love
Speaker 2: to win fifty thousand dollars, but finding the Sasquatch of
Speaker 2: prime numbers sounds a bit too mathy for me. But
Speaker 2: that is where you're wrong, because here's the best part
Speaker 2: about the hunt for Mersenne primes. You don't need to
Speaker 2: be good at math, and that's because our friend George
Speaker 2: has made it easy for us.
Speaker 4: I wrote some software that can find these prime numbers
Speaker 4: and put it on the Internet for anybody to download.
Speaker 4: You need no mathematical backgrounds to run this software.
Speaker 2: You can find the software George made online at a
Speaker 2: website called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, better known
Speaker 2: by its acronym gimps.
Speaker 5: Yes, gimps, but founded gimps in nineteen ninety six, and
Speaker 5: we found seventeen world record primes.
Speaker 4: Over the years.
Speaker 2: Over twenty seven years, Georgia's software has helped regular people
Speaker 2: like you and me find insanely large Marsenne primes over
Speaker 2: and over and over, which is a huge leap forward
Speaker 2: when you consider the history of Marsennes. For centuries, the
Speaker 2: only way to dig up a Mersenne was to sit
Speaker 2: down with a quill and ink and divide by hand
Speaker 2: potential numbers. Later, new and better algorithms with names like
Speaker 2: the Lucas Lemur test were developed to help speed the
Speaker 2: job along. Eventually it got too difficult for our three
Speaker 2: pound brains to do the math. The last time somebody
Speaker 2: dug up a Mersenne prime, mostly by hand, was back
Speaker 2: in nineteen fourteen. Another Mersenne wouldn't be found for another
Speaker 2: thirty eight years. When computers hit the scene in the
Speaker 2: early nineteen fifties, computers were finding Mercenes left and right.
Speaker 2: Five Marsennes were found in nineteen fifty two alone. Two
Speaker 2: were found on the same day, but eventually even the
Speaker 2: supercomputers got stumped. By the late nineties, the best way
Speaker 2: to search for a Marsenne was to use a Kray
Speaker 2: T ninety four, a supercomputer that ran so hot that
Speaker 2: were it not for an internal coolant system, it would
Speaker 2: literally melt itself. And that is when George would in.
Speaker 4: I thought, if I made this software put it up
Speaker 4: on the internet, maybe one hundred people would pick it
Speaker 4: up and start using it.
Speaker 2: George wanted to help regular people, people without access to supercomputers,
Speaker 2: hunt for mersenes. He wrote software that could be used
Speaker 2: on a personal computer and posted it to the gimps website.
Speaker 2: It immediately surpassed all expectations, and.
Speaker 4: By the end of the first year they were well
Speaker 4: over one thousand.
Speaker 2: More than two hundred thousand people have tried the gimps
Speaker 2: software since, and you're invited. The software runs in the
Speaker 2: background of your computer. All you have to do is
Speaker 2: pick a potential number and wait and wait and wait
Speaker 2: some more.
Speaker 4: If you're looking for thirty million digit prime number, he
Speaker 4: will take your computer about a week to test that number.
Speaker 4: If you're going to go for the big money and
Speaker 4: look for one of those hundred million digit guys, it's
Speaker 4: gonna take probably one to two months.
Speaker 2: Using the GIMPS software is like playing the world's longest
Speaker 2: game of roulette. You pick a number, you spin the wheel,
Speaker 2: and then you wait eternity to see if you've got
Speaker 2: a winner, and chances are you won't.
Speaker 4: I've gone through probably thirty thousand numbers at estimate, everyone
Speaker 4: of failure.
Speaker 2: That's right. George, the founder of gimbs, has tested more
Speaker 2: than thirty thousand potential numbers, and he has never found
Speaker 2: a Mersenne prime. And even though the odds are against him,
Speaker 2: even though he's failed thirty thousand times, he's still looking,
Speaker 2: and so are thousands of other people. And that's because
Speaker 2: the chance of hitting it big turns some people into fanatics.
Speaker 6: The number takes on a life all its own. It's
Speaker 6: a life that you and your computer nourish with CPU cycles.
Speaker 6: Even though only a tiny fraction of the test could
Speaker 6: have possibly been performed. You check on it several times
Speaker 6: a day, just in case something goes wrong. You get
Speaker 6: to know it like a friend. The time invested on
Speaker 6: each exponent is what makes gimps special. It teaches the
Speaker 6: user patience and perseverance, and devotion and loyalty soon follow.
Speaker 2: That's a line taken from the GIMP's website and Frankly,
Speaker 2: the whole devotion and loyalty follow Shpiel sounds a little
Speaker 2: bit well culty, and maybe it is. The people who
Speaker 2: love gimps really really love it.
Speaker 4: The typical per sen prime hunt. This probably won't be flattering,
Speaker 4: but they're probably nerds or geeks. I proudly label myself
Speaker 4: a geek runner, and so I don't view that as
Speaker 4: a derogatory term.
Speaker 2: These nerds and geeks can become addicted to this digital
Speaker 2: treasure hunt, and some go to extreme lengths to find
Speaker 2: a Marsinne. We wanted to get inside this world of
Speaker 2: Marsinne obsessives, so we went on a hunt ourselves and
Speaker 2: found this guy.
Speaker 7: My name is Curtis Cooper, and I'm a retired professor
Speaker 7: of math and computer science at the University of Central Missouri.
Speaker 2: Chris Cooper taught at Missouri for thirty nine years, where
Speaker 2: he lectured in calculus, number theory, and computer science. And
Speaker 2: when we talked to him, he seemed like a regular
Speaker 2: humble guy.
Speaker 7: My wife would say, maybe you need a lie or something.
Speaker 2: But the truth is Curtis is a gimps legend. He
Speaker 2: is the nineteen twenty seven New York Yankees the nineties
Speaker 2: the Pele of Marsenne hunting, because Curtis has found not one,
Speaker 2: not two, not.
Speaker 7: Three, but we found fourmer Sinn primes.
Speaker 2: Four Mersenne primes, which, if I haven't already stressed this enough,
Speaker 2: is insane. Curtis has found more Mersenne primes than anybody
Speaker 2: in living history, and judging from our interview, it couldn't
Speaker 2: happen to a better guy. Curtis's love for mersennees just
Speaker 2: radiates from him.
Speaker 7: I've always really enjoyed studying them because it seems something
Speaker 7: that's so pure and so natural. From my perspective, those
Speaker 7: are kind of jewels in number theory.
Speaker 2: Curtis has been hunting these jewels, basically none stop for
Speaker 2: more than twenty five years, and he's been throwing everything
Speaker 2: at the wall.
Speaker 7: When I initially got started in GIMS, I was using
Speaker 7: three or four of my PCs at the time.
Speaker 2: Curtis believed that four PCs was a little overboard.
Speaker 7: I thought, wow, for is pretty good for trying to
Speaker 7: look for prime numbers.
Speaker 2: But remember it takes about a week to test a
Speaker 2: number four PCs. We'll only test two hundred and eight
Speaker 2: numbers a year. This wasn't good enough, so Curtis would
Speaker 2: enlist more computers. He and a colleague began asking the
Speaker 2: university for help. Could we use the PCs in the
Speaker 2: computer lab? What about the library? Can I use the
Speaker 2: machines in this building that building. By two thousand and five,
Speaker 2: Curtis had a lot more than just four computers scavenging
Speaker 2: for mare senes.
Speaker 7: In our heyday when we had a lot more labs
Speaker 7: on campus and stuff, probably between maybe seven hundred and
Speaker 7: eight hundred computers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Curtis had about eight hundred couters looking for Mersenne primes.
Speaker 2: And even with all that computer power, Curtis spent eight
Speaker 2: years finding absolutely nothing. That is until December two thousand
Speaker 2: and five. One of his computers was testing a number
Speaker 2: with nine point one million digits. The gimps software chewed
Speaker 2: on the number for about two or three weeks, but
Speaker 2: when it finished calculations, it notified Curtis that it was
Speaker 2: a Mersenne prime.
Speaker 7: The feeling was almost like surreal, like is this really happening?
Speaker 7: I was like a Christmas present in a way.
Speaker 2: Curtis earned three thousand dollars, which was given to the university,
Speaker 2: and then Curtis went back to work enlisting his army
Speaker 2: of eight hundred sum computers to keep searching for mersennes.
Speaker 2: Just a few months later, in two thousand and six,
Speaker 2: he struck again.
Speaker 7: And then we found a second, And then.
Speaker 2: Seven years later in twenty.
Speaker 7: Thirteen, we found the third.
Speaker 2: And then in two thoy fifteen.
Speaker 7: And we found the fourth.
Speaker 2: The last number contained twenty two million digits. It was
Speaker 2: triple the size of his first mersine, and the thrill
Speaker 2: of finding it a fourth time was just as intense.
Speaker 7: It was sort of the same exhilaration, almost like winning
Speaker 7: the lottery of powerball or something.
Speaker 2: Today, Curtis no longer holds the record for finding the
Speaker 2: world's largest Mersenne prime. Since his discovery, two hunters have
Speaker 2: upped him. The first was a guy named John Pace,
Speaker 2: a church deacon in Tennessee who had installed the GIMPS
Speaker 2: software on a church computer. Pace spent fourteen years looking
Speaker 2: for a Mersinne before the church PC spit out a
Speaker 2: Mersenne prime. That number was so big that when Pace
Speaker 2: printed it in two point font on eleven x seventeen paper,
Speaker 2: it took up sixty nine and a half sheets of paper.
Speaker 2: The latest and largest Mersenne discovered was found in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: when a Florida Man, You Go Florida Man named Patrick
Speaker 2: Laroche found a prime so big that if I tried
Speaker 2: reading out all twenty four million digits, this podcast episode
Speaker 2: would quite literally become the longest podcast episode ever recorded.
Speaker 2: So I'll just give you the shorthand. The world's largest
Speaker 2: known Mersenne prime is two to the power of eighty
Speaker 2: two million, five hundred eighty nine thousand, nine hundred eighty
Speaker 2: three minus one. The crazy thing about that discovery it
Speaker 2: happened on Laroche's fourth try. For comparison, George Waltman has
Speaker 2: tested thirty thousand numbers and has found zilch. Curtis Cooper
Speaker 2: told us he finishes testing forty numbers every day, which
Speaker 2: goes to show this is anybody's game. A complete newcomer
Speaker 2: can swoop in and find the next prime, and eventually
Speaker 2: someone will find the one hundred million digit Mersenne four
Speaker 2: fifty thousand dollars. But while prize money is always nice,
Speaker 2: there's more to all this than money. Big numbers have
Speaker 2: an undeniable allure. Back in two thousand and seven, Jeremy
Speaker 2: Harper of Alabama caught the world's attention when he set
Speaker 2: a record by counting from one to one million out loud.
Speaker 2: Thousands of people watched as he live streamed the count
Speaker 2: over the internet twenty four to seven. It took him
Speaker 2: eighty nine days. Meanwhile, YouTubers like Matt Parker of number
Speaker 2: file have posted unboxing videos of them opening up printed
Speaker 2: versions of the latest Mersenne Prime. Big numbers are just exciting.
Speaker 2: Think back to the schoolyard playground. Who among us in
Speaker 2: a quest to one up our friends hasn't gone from
Speaker 2: the double dog Dare to the triple dog Dare to
Speaker 2: the triple dog Dare. Time's infinity. Immense numbers were our
Speaker 2: way of winning the day. Frankly, the only people more
Speaker 2: obsessed with huge numbers than little kids are well mathematicians.
Speaker 2: A few decades ago, a mathematician named Ronald Graham came
Speaker 2: up with a number so big that were it written down,
Speaker 2: the observable universe could not contain it. And then, in
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven, MIT hosted a big Number duel
Speaker 2: to find an even larger number. The Mexican philosophy professor
Speaker 2: Augustin Reo eventually found a number so big that, by definition,
Speaker 2: it cannot be expressed through language. All of This might
Speaker 2: have you wondering, what's the point. There's got to be
Speaker 2: some practical application to finding huge numbers like Mersenne primes, right.
Speaker 7: I almost hate to say this. I don't know of
Speaker 7: any application that this great big number. I don't know
Speaker 7: how we could use that.
Speaker 2: That again, is Curtis Cooper, and as he explained, most
Speaker 2: Mersenne primes are so big that they are basically useless.
Speaker 2: But that's not to say they're completely useless. One Mersenne
Speaker 2: four billion, two hundred ninety four million, nine hundred sixty
Speaker 2: seven thousand, two hundred ninety five is the largest memory
Speaker 2: address for CPUs with a thirty two bit address bus.
Speaker 2: That might sound like a bunch of computer gobbledegook, and I,
Speaker 2: to be quite honest, have no idea what it means,
Speaker 2: but just know that this has practical consequences for a
Speaker 2: lot of computer systems. In fact, in two thousand and
Speaker 2: four that Mersenne was used to control the timers on
Speaker 2: all radio air traffic around Los Angeles. When the timers
Speaker 2: hit that number, it caused air traffic control to lose
Speaker 2: contact with more than eight hundred aircrafts. Or consider oilers mersin,
Speaker 2: which we talked about at the top of the episode.
Speaker 2: That number is the highest score you can get on
Speaker 2: most video games. In Grand Theft Auto, it's the maximum
Speaker 2: amount of cash you can hold. These small mersins are
Speaker 2: everywhere we go. They're used by Apple to encrypt and
Speaker 2: decrypt messages. They're used to encrypt sales over the Internet too.
Speaker 2: But the really big mersins are too big for their
Speaker 2: own good.
Speaker 4: The uses are rather few and far between.
Speaker 2: That again, is George Waltman.
Speaker 4: Maybe when quantum computing comes along in fifty years, maybe
Speaker 4: we will need a twenty five million digit key, but
Speaker 4: today there's no need for it.
Speaker 2: So big mersens are pretty much useless. But there is
Speaker 2: use to searching for mersins. Testing Amersen is not easy
Speaker 2: for your computer. It takes a lot of computing power
Speaker 2: and as a result, it's a great stress test for
Speaker 2: a processor, and so some companies use gimps to test
Speaker 2: their computer chips before shipping them out to market.
Speaker 4: One weird benefit of the search for Mersen primes is
Speaker 4: it actually is so hard on a CPU that Intel
Speaker 4: was using it to find flaws in their chips, and
Speaker 4: over the last twenty five years, two or three times
Speaker 4: we found flaws in their CPUs. Just five years ago,
Speaker 4: AMD found a flaw in their CPU based upon running
Speaker 4: this software that's so brutally hard on the floating point
Speaker 4: unit in the chip.
Speaker 2: These sorts of stress tests can have a huge impact.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety four, a mouth professor looking for prime
Speaker 2: numbers stumbled upon a bug in Intel Pentium chips that
Speaker 2: later cost the company four hundred and seventy five million dollars.
Speaker 2: So the Marsenne hunt isn't completely useless, but usefulness. It's
Speaker 2: not the reason people hunt for them.
Speaker 4: Chris Caldwell, who brand the largest prime number website, compared
Speaker 4: it to the Hope diamond. It sits in a museum.
Speaker 4: It has no use. It's just there to sit there
Speaker 4: and look pretty and for you to admire. A Mersinn
Speaker 4: prime is kind of like that. It's the largest of
Speaker 4: its kind. It sits there and looks pretty and you
Speaker 4: can marvel at it, and that's that's about all it's
Speaker 4: good for.
Speaker 2: And a lot of people are content with that because
Speaker 2: people like Curtis and George, they aren't looking for Mersenne
Speaker 2: primes because they want to change the world. Their motivation
Speaker 2: is simpler.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you could be in a for the prize money.
Speaker 4: You could be at it for the glory of finding
Speaker 4: a numerous in prime, or you could be at it
Speaker 4: for advancing mathematical knowledge a little bit.
Speaker 2: Chris Caldwell, a math professor at University of Tennessee Martin,
Speaker 2: has compared the hunt to competitive sports. It's the thrill
Speaker 2: of competition, He says.
Speaker 3: Why do athletes try to run faster than anyone else,
Speaker 3: jump higher, throw a javelin? Further? Is it because they
Speaker 3: use the skills of javelin throwing in their jobs?
Speaker 4: Not likely. I've kind of always equated it to people
Speaker 4: who climb mountains and their ultimate goal is to climb
Speaker 4: Mount evereston no practical value in it, personal accomplishment in it.
Speaker 2: When we asked Curtis why he hunts fourmer sens, he
Speaker 2: made the same exact comparison. They were his Everest. You
Speaker 2: don't make the climb for money. You do it because
Speaker 2: you feel called to climb, because the climb in itself
Speaker 2: is beautiful.
Speaker 7: I think a lot of that is beautiful. Maybe I'm
Speaker 7: too much of a geek on the digits of the number,
Speaker 7: but the four that we found I kind of tell
Speaker 7: my wife, I said, I'll never forget. You know, the
Speaker 7: exponents that are there and well, if I think I'll
Speaker 7: go to my deathbed knowing the four that we found.
Speaker 2: Saren, I have to say, just finding out that you
Speaker 2: were a Merson Prime guy, how did you get into it?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 1: So I actually like their uh, just like their twin
Speaker 1: sister twin brother, which is called perfect numbers. Every mers
Speaker 1: in prime has a perfect number, and every perfect number
Speaker 1: has immersed in prime. So I love perfect numbers. An
Speaker 1: example is twenty eight, and a perfect number is the
Speaker 1: sum of its divisor. So you have one, two, four, seven,
Speaker 1: and fourteen, right, and those you had those up together
Speaker 1: twenty eight And that's totally honest.
Speaker 2: I just sort of went somewhere else.
Speaker 1: Anytime my fiance I talked to her about math, and
Speaker 1: I can just watch your eyes like the curtain lowers.
Speaker 1: It's just amazing. But basically the point is is that
Speaker 1: the thing about math that I loved and was drawn
Speaker 1: to is it's like if art could be entirely in
Speaker 1: your imagination or in your mind. Right, you can appreciate
Speaker 1: the contours, the lines, the symmetry, and you don't actually
Speaker 1: have to have a physical thing, and then you can
Speaker 1: talk to another person about that. They look at a
Speaker 1: couple symbols and then all of a sudden, that same
Speaker 1: symmetry and beauty appears in their mind. That's what I
Speaker 1: love about math. It's like music, but it's.
Speaker 2: Numbers that's so beautiful.
Speaker 3: Saren, is your computer running at all hours?
Speaker 1: It's currently looking for two different number. Actually, actually right now,
Speaker 1: it's confirming the work of others because I don't have
Speaker 1: a number i'm searching for. I'm actually calculating a new
Speaker 1: one to look for, and it is currently doing the
Speaker 1: work that gims wants, which is helping others. I'm just
Speaker 1: letting my computers check somebody else's work and being like,
Speaker 1: come on, buddy, I hope you get it. It's a
Speaker 1: team effort.
Speaker 3: Have you ever met anyone who's found one.
Speaker 1: No, they're so rare. There's fifty one of them, and
Speaker 1: most recent ones have been found by a couple of guys,
Speaker 1: and uh, I've never had the joy of meeting like
Speaker 1: Curtis Cooper, but I see their names on the gimp
Speaker 1: site all the time because they are checking so many numbers.
Speaker 1: I saw his name was like, I know him, but
Speaker 1: I do not know him. By the way, who was
Speaker 1: your guys' favorite character? A special episode character for this one,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: It's Mersenne, he gets the name shot.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's the MVP.
Speaker 1: Do you guys cast this one? Danage, you cast Jason?
Speaker 2: Can you cast this one?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 2: Watson from IBM and also Deep Blue from IBM. The
Speaker 2: two so the Jeopardy supercomputer and the Chess supercomputer. They
Speaker 2: are the stars of this episode.
Speaker 3: I like that.
Speaker 1: I thought about Marin Mersen. He could be played by
Speaker 1: Edward Norton if you made the movie. Just to pull
Speaker 1: from your board, I mean, I thought he got He's
Speaker 1: got the monks vibe. You can totally feel him out there,
Speaker 1: like in the Abbey by himself. Leonard Euler. I was
Speaker 1: thinking Giovanni Ribisi because if you've seen a picture, the
Speaker 1: famous image of Oiler, it looks just like Giovanni Ribisi, right,
Speaker 1: George Woltman, this is a little bit out there. But
Speaker 1: Francis Ford Coppola, he's a kind heart chasing after greatness.
Speaker 1: He gets it. And then Curtis Cooper, because I got
Speaker 1: to give a shout out to my man, Cartis Cooper,
Speaker 1: Mark Ruffalo, the cozy, rumpled yet ambitious nerd. And finally
Speaker 1: the next person to find immerc in Prime me so
Speaker 1: there you go. That's all my casting.
Speaker 3: Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
Speaker 3: This show is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Zaren Burnett and
Speaker 3: me Jason English. Today's episode was written by Lucas Riley.
Speaker 3: Our producer is Josh Fisher. Editing and sound design by
Speaker 3: Emily maronof mixing and mastering by Behid Fraser. Original music
Speaker 3: by Elise McCoy. Research and fact checking by Austin Thompson
Speaker 3: and Lucas Riley. Show logo by Lucy Quintinia. Special thanks
Speaker 3: to Carl Catle for some excellent voice acting. I'm your
Speaker 3: executive producer and we'll see you back here next Wednesday.
Speaker 3: Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.