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A few other memorable primes: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2420488/what-is-tri... 888888888888888888888888888888 888888888888888888888888888888 888888888888888888888888888888 888111111111111111111111111888 888111111111111111111111111888 888111111811111111118111111888 888111118811111111118811111888 888111188811111111118881111888 888111188811111111118881111888 888111888811111111118888111888 8881118888811111…
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> Belphegor (or Baal Peor, Hebrew: בַּעַל-פְּעוֹר baʿal-pəʿōr – “Lord of the Gap”) is, in the Abrahamic religions, a demon associated with one of the seven deadly sins. According to religious tradition, he helps people make discoveries. He seduces people by proposing incredible inventions that will make them rich. Huh. Would feel right at home in our industry. > According to some demonologists from the 17th century,…
Can’t spell “demon” without “demo”. Cue the church lady.
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I thought everybody factors phone numbers. I also factor the odometer reading in my car while driving.
How do you do mental factoring?
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1. To check for divisibility by 11, subtract the sum of even numbered digits from the sub of odd numbered digits. If 11∣n, then you’ll have a multiple of 11. E.g., for 13,857, we compare (3+5)-(1+8+7)=-8 which is not a multiple of 11.³
2. To check for divisibility by 111, we take advantage of the fact that 3×37=111, 27×37=999 and thus 1000≡1(mod 37) and we can then add up the digits in groups of 3, and pull out the most convenient multiple of 111 to see if we have 0, 37 or 74. E.g., with our example about, 13+852=865-888=-23 which is not a multiple of 37.
3. As an added bonus that number is the remainder when dividing by 11. Similarly the number I get with the check in footnote 2 is the remainder when dividing by 37.
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How do you do mental factoring?
I don’t usually keep the factors, but I have a variety of techniques. Putting aside the trivial cases of divisibility by 2, 3, 5, 11¹ and 37², a lot of it comes down to find ways to make the numbers smaller, so, for example. my current odometer reading is 13,857. To test for divisibility by 7, I can turn that into 14,000-13852=143 which I can tell at a glance isn’t divisible by 7. It is divisible by 3, so I can reduc…
Doesn't take very much searching to find this pretty nifty palindrome prime: 3,212,123 (the 333rd palindrome prime) Interestingly, there are no four digit palindrome primes because they would be divisible by 11. This is obvious in retrospect but I found this fact by giving NotebookLM a big list of palindrome primes (just to see what it could possibly say about it over a podcast). For the curious, here's a small set o…
> Interestingly, there are no four digit palindrome primes because they would be divisible by 11. In fact, this holds for any even number of digits.
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How do you do mental factoring?
I don’t usually keep the factors, but I have a variety of techniques. Putting aside the trivial cases of divisibility by 2, 3, 5, 11¹ and 37², a lot of it comes down to find ways to make the numbers smaller, so, for example. my current odometer reading is 13,857. To test for divisibility by 7, I can turn that into 14,000-13852=143 which I can tell at a glance isn’t divisible by 7. It is divisible by 3, so I can reduc…
I wanted to share this small gem of a paper in case it helps you like it's helped me:
"Simple divisibility rules for the 1st 1000 prime numbers": https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0001012
My family’s phone number when I was a child was both a palindrome and a prime: 7984897. My parents had had the number for two decades without noticing it was a palindrome. I still remember my father’s delight when he got off a phone call with a friend: “Doug just said, ‘Hey, I dialed your number backwards and it was still you who answered.’ I never noticed that before!” A few years later, around 1973, one of the othe…
Follow-up: My formal study of programming stopped with that Fortran IV class a half century ago, but LLMs now delude me into thinking I can program. I just had Claude write me a Python program to list all of the seven-digit numbers that are both primes and palindromes. It found 668: 1003001, 1008001, 1022201, 1028201, 1035301, ...
deified 3485843
bib 181
did 383
I note that none of them use letters which map to double-digits (k=10, l=11, m=12, etc.); none of the palindrome sentences make palindromic numbers (ignoring case, stripping all punctuation); could there be one which does?
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_palindromes
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I don’t usually keep the factors, but I have a variety of techniques. Putting aside the trivial cases of divisibility by 2, 3, 5, 11¹ and 37², a lot of it comes down to find ways to make the numbers smaller, so, for example. my current odometer reading is 13,857. To test for divisibility by 7, I can turn that into 14,000-13852=143 which I can tell at a glance isn’t divisible by 7. It is divisible by 3, so I can reduc…
Interesting! What do you do when you try to factor a large number that doesn't yield to any of your mental factoring techniques? It might be prime, after all, or composite with only large prime factors. Do you give up after a while? Run it through a factoring program? Keep plugging away until you get to the number's square root?
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Follow-up: My formal study of programming stopped with that Fortran IV class a half century ago, but LLMs now delude me into thinking I can program. I just had Claude write me a Python program to list all of the seven-digit numbers that are both primes and palindromes. It found 668: 1003001, 1008001, 1022201, 1028201, 1035301, ...
I wondered if we map English letters to digits (a=0, b=1, c=2, ... , z=25) is there anything which is both a palindrome in its English form and in its number form, and prime? I took a list of palindromes from Wikipedia[1] and tested them, and yes: deified 3485843 bib 181 did 383 I note that none of them use letters which map to double-digits (k=10, l=11, m=12, etc.); none of the palindrome sentences make palindromic…
Might not be as much fun, though.
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I don’t usually keep the factors, but I have a variety of techniques. Putting aside the trivial cases of divisibility by 2, 3, 5, 11¹ and 37², a lot of it comes down to find ways to make the numbers smaller, so, for example. my current odometer reading is 13,857. To test for divisibility by 7, I can turn that into 14,000-13852=143 which I can tell at a glance isn’t divisible by 7. It is divisible by 3, so I can reduc…
Hello fellow hobby factorizer :) I wanted to share this small gem of a paper in case it helps you like it's helped me: "Simple divisibility rules for the 1st 1000 prime numbers": https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0001012