Sea of Humanity

World's Largest Number

There has been all sorts of hooplah surrounding Central Missouri State University's announcement that its researchers had discovered the largest prime number. At over 9.1 million digits, we here at the Sea admit that the number is pretty big, but what we don't understand all of the accolades surrounding the prime number's status as a Mersenne Prime. Sure, for the uninitiated it sounds pretty cool. It rolls off the tongue "Mersenne Prime". But, frankly, we at the Sea really couldn't give a rat's ass about the whole thing. We were through with prime number theory after grade school.

We aren't poo-pooing CMSU's discovery. We are sure they expended a lot of time and effort to discover the number. We are just disappointed in their choice of goals, as we are chasing much bigger game. For the past few years we have been in the hunt for the world's largest number. Fuck large primes. Sure we have been laughed at, called crackpots and even spit on by otherwise respectable number theorists and mathematicians. "You'll never find it!" we've been told. "There is an infinite number of numbers, you morons!" a certain pre-eminent number theorist told us. As far as we are concerned, infinity is just a damn theory and our gut says it is flawed.

You can try and brush us off, but this is real math. It is supported by the bible. God said "I am the Alpha and the Omega." God didn't say I am the Alpha and whatever the Greek term is for infinity. So, clearly, everything must have a beginning and an end; a first and a last. I don't understand why people, especially math phd's, don't get it. I can remember when I was at a Symposium on the Strong Law of Small Numbers at Oxford and I had a classically trained mathematician give me the old "but haven't you heard of the concept of infinity?" response to my description of our groundbreaking research. His eyes glazed over when I responded that yes I had heard of this "infinity" thing, but that we were carving out finite subsets of infinity and counting them all up. Set theory, no one expects it and everyone discounts it. We are basically taking the underpinnings of calculus and using them to disprove infinity. There is a limit out there and we will find it.

Just last year we thought we had found it, the largest number, the answer to everything. It was beautiful too. Digit after digit, raw math at its finest. There was some backslapping and we were ready to pop the champagne, but then Monkeyspit said "What if we add twelve to it?" The conference room fell dead quiet, the press releases were pulled. Fucking twelve. No one had thought about that. Adding twelve to it. That was a dark, dark day for us all. But after a few days of drinking, we fired up our room of Commodore Vic-20's and started at it again. That number is out there and, by God, we are going to find it. If you are really into this, you have to wonder will the largest number be a Marsenne Prime? Will it be odd or even? We just don't know really.. Man, number theory is hard.