OF A GOLDEN AGE

Pfft, that’s actually not news at all.

A prime number is only divisible by itself and one, with no other factors. For instance, 4 is not a prime number because it’s divisible by 2. Many people intuit that past a certain point there are no more prime numbers, because big numbers MUST be divisible by something, right? Stupid lying intuition.

Here are some giant prime numbers. They’re not even close to the largest ones, which we aren’t sure are even close to the largest ones we don’t know about yet.

18,926,659
4,572,487
914,873
98,686,867
296,041
42,974,627
35,864,177
1,817,707

I am enrolled in a test-review class where we talk about math a lot. A couple of weeks ago I asked the instructor to help me with a specific question, to which she responded, “Let’s do a factor tree.” YESSSS!

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