Every Monday night, I sing with a group of people over in Berkeley. We always take a break halfway through the evening, and tonight two of the singers told us how they got held up at gunpoint in front of their house, at 5 in the afternoon, in a good neighborhood in Oakland. They were unharmed, but both of them were quite shaken by the experience. They said that the police told them that the continuing recession has made crime worse.
Happy prime new year
This is going to be a prime year, and by that I don’t mean it’s going to be first-rate (though I don’t rule that out) — rather, 2011 is a prime number.
Since 2011 is a prime number, that means we can look forward to having several dates that consist solely of prime numbers. The first one will be 2/2/2011, and the last 11/29/2011. I leave it as an exercise to the student to determine how many of these dates will occur all year (translation: I’m too lazy to figure it out myself, and I hope someone will post a comment with the answer). *
The last prime number year was 2003, and the next one will be 2017. While searching for lists of primes on the Web, I discovered that 2011 and 2017 are so-called “sexy primes”; that is, they differ by six (“sexy” from the Latin “sex” for six); if they differed by four, they would be cousin primes, and if by two, twin primes. Thus 2011 is a sexy prime number year.
I suspect I am fascinated by prime number years because I was born in the middle of the largest gap in prime number years in the twentieth century (1951 to 1973). I had to wait more than a decade to live in a prime number year; I had a deprived childhood.
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* Here’s the list of primes 31 and under: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31. Don’t say I didn’t help you out. Oh, all right, the answer is 52.