Prime Numbers for June 29 to July 5, from today's New York Times. (I don't know if this is a weekly thing; it could be but I don't recall seeing it before.)
The numbers are 46, 62000, 30, 18%, and 30000; each is important to some news story from this week. (If you want to get technical, 62000 and 30000 are approximations.)
Presumably they mean "prime" in the sense of "important". Or in the sense of "composite", but that would be a bit perverse.
A random walk through mathematics -- mostly through the random part.
Blog Archive
-
►
2011
(46)
- December (3)
- November (3)
- October (1)
- September (2)
- August (6)
- July (1)
- June (2)
- May (3)
- April (5)
- March (8)
- February (10)
- January (2)
-
►
2009
(122)
- December (3)
- October (2)
- September (7)
- August (5)
- July (9)
- June (7)
- May (6)
- April (7)
- March (18)
- February (27)
- January (31)
Contributors
Other blogs
- An American Physics Student in England
- Anarchaia
- Arcadian Functor
- Ars Mathematica
- Brown Sharpie
- Casting Out Nines
- Confessions of a Mathematician
- Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media
- Freakonomics
- Game Theorist
- Good Math, Bad Math
- Gooseania
- Gowers's Weblog
- http://mathnotations.blogspot.com
- Information Aesthetics
- Information Processing
- Junk Charts
- Language Log
- Learning Curves
- Machine Learning (Theory)
- Math Notations
- MathTrek
- Science After Sunclipse
- Scientific Curiosity
- SciTalks
- Secret Blogging Seminar
- Sentient Developments
- Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
- Statistics Consulting Blog
- Terence Tao's blog
- The Everything Seminar
- The Narrow Road
- The Unapologetic Mathematician
- The Universe of Discourse
- Vlorbik on Math Ed
- WebDiarios de Motocicleta
- Wingie
- Wolfram Blog
- WSJ.com: The Numbers Guy
3 comments:
Or worse, in the sense of "even." It's not like any of these are fake primes.
There used to be a regular feature in the same format: the news and behind the news. Will it be the prime numbers and behind the prime numbers from now on? If so,welcome to another annoying linguistic overloading. If the name sticks, this meaning of a prime number as a number of primary importance may become more popular and widely accepted than its mathematical meaning. Vectors and homology in biology come to mind.
'Prime' as in that's the first word that came into the writer/editor's tiny little head. Possibly. God plays dice. Very cheeky. ;)
Post a Comment