A Prime to Kill

A few weeks ago my friend invited me to a party in a part of town I didn’t know. Being a guy, I didn’t ask for directions and instead Google mapped it. I memorized the route and tried to remember the street address.Let’s pretend the address was 7793 St. Michael’s street. Not wanting to write anything down, I looked at the number and tried to divide it. I find it’s easier to remember the smaller multiples of a number than the whole number itself.

To my chagrin, 7793 was not evenly divisible by 3, 7 or 11. On the way there, I tried to divide it by larger and larger prime numbers in the hopes that I could break it down further. Thirteen, 17, 19, 23 and 29 all failed, as did 31, 37 and 41. At this point the number was ingrained into my memory, but I didn’t want to give up: I felt like 7793 had challenged my manhood and I was letting it get away with the upper hand.

I tried dividing 7793 by 43, 47, 53 and —this is how irrational I was getting— by 57 as well. Ha ha! Isn’t that ridiculous?? ((For those of you non-geeks, 57 is divisible by 3 and 29. Since I’d already tried 3 and 29 individually, 3 x 29 would obviously not divide into 7793 as 57… obviously.))

As I got closer and closer to the house, I found myself driving slower and slower to give me more time to do long-division in my head. It turned out that 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79 and 83 didn’t work either. As I reached the house, I did one final calculation to see if 7793 was indeed prime. I tried multiplying my last prime number by itself. If 89 x 89 yielded a greater number than 7793, it would effectively be declaring 7793 prime and thus a bigger man than me ((Again, translating geek, as the prime numbers I divided got bigger, the pair you would multiply them with to yield 7793 would get smaller. Thus, eventually, you would get to the largest possible prime beyond which nothing could conceivably divide. Since the square root of 7793 is 88 < x < 89, and no smaller primes had worked, then this calculation would prove to me that the number was prime. If this is confusing you as much as explaining it confused me, just assume it’s magic.)).

I multiplied the 9… 801

I multiplied the 80… 7120

I added them up… 7921

NOO!!!!

I shouted to the heavens. How could it be? Who lives on a prime number? I mean, really?? I was defeated. I could never show my face in Flatland ever again.

Final score (for those of you that keep track of the numbers):

7793: 1

Pixel: 0

A few weeks ago my friend invited me to a party in a part of town I didn’t know. Being a guy, I didn’t ask for directions and instead Google mapped it. I memorized the route and tried to remember the street address.Let’s pretend the address was 7793 St. Michael’s street. Not wanting to write…