4DLab - Critical Thinking

Historical Quotations About Prime Numbers

A humor page.

Below is a chronological collection of imaginary thoughts and sayings from some selected famous people regarding their opinion about the series of the prime numbers. As with field of complex variables, each entry is a complex situation where the real part are their names, and the imaginary part are their quotations.

Each imagined thought was devised trying to reflect their particular way of reasoning, or at least, by the way we remember their lasting works.

1. (780 B. C.) Mohammad ibn al-Khwarizmi of Baghdad: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime … 9 is not prime, but don’t’ tell it to the infidels.”
    
2. (469 B.C.) Socrates: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime,  9 is … sorry, this leads me to the discovery that I only know that I know nothing.”
    
3. (384 B.C.) Aristotle: “1 is not prime, by definition. 2 is an unnatural prime, 4 is an unnatural prime, and 6 is an unnatural prime. All other natural primes cannot be unnatural primes.”
    
4.  (1225) Thomas of Aquinas: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime and 9 is prime. God can do anything.”
    
5. (1285) William of Occam: “3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, and 7 is a prime. Why bother with non-prime numbers when the primes can do everything? "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem¹."
    
6. (1451) Christopher Columbus: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime. According to some ancient manuscripts 9 is not a prime number, but beyond the distant horizon of the oceans, in the New World that I am going to discover, there are surely lots of them.”
    
7. (1532) Menoccio  Scandella: “In the beginning there was a chaos, and out of the chaos came the primes: 1, 2, 3. Out of these numbers came the composites like the holes in a fermented cheese.”
    
8. (1548) Giordano Bruno: “I don’t care if 1 is prime or not, if 2 is prime or not, if 3 is prime or not. All I care is that there are more stars in the heavens than primes in the earth.”
    
9. (1564) Galileo Galilei: “I, Galileo, son of the late Vicenzo Galilei, swear that I never said that the prime numbers are useless. What I said was that you cannot count lunar craters by counting 2, 3, 5, 7, …”
    
10. (1642) Isaac Newton: “If numbers had mass, then 6 will be gravitationally pulled by the primes 2 and 3. However, no body can pull masses 3, 5  and 7 because no mass can pull itself.  On the other hand, when it comes to 9, … well, this requires advanced calculus because now we are talking about the inverse square law.”
     
11. (1732) George Washington: “What’s the difference between prime numbers and composite numbers? There are no real differences, remember: "E pluribus unum².”
     
12. (1809) Abraham Lincoln: “3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime and  9 should be a prime. But keep in mind that you can fool all the primes some of the time,  and some of the  primes all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the primes all of the time.”
     
13. (1818) Karl Marx: “2 is a proletariat prime, but 4, 6 and 8 are also composite proletariats. Composites of the world unite; you have nothing to loose but your chains!”
     
14. (1834) Dimitri Mendeleev: “3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, and 7 is a prime, but 9 is a noble prime that deserves a separate row in the periodic table of the primes.”
     
15. (1838) Edwin Abbott Abbott: “3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, and 9 is A Square prime. Flatland is a place that welcomes any prime from the third dimension.”
     
16. (1845) George Cantor: “ΐ₃ is a transfinite prime, ΐ₅ and ΐ₇ are also transfinite primes; however, it is my conjecture that ΐ₉ is  possibly the first transfinite composite between ΐ₇ and ΐ₁₁. Keep in mind that any single irrational number contains all the digits of all the primes.”
     
17. (1869) Mahatma Gandhi: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, but 9 is not prime; in this incarnation.”
     
18. (1872) Bertrand Russell: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime,  9 is a paradox; as is a paradox why the number 1 is not prime if it has no other divisors besides himself.”
     
19. (1880) General Douglas MacArthur: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, and some reports from the battlefront tell me that 9 is not prime, but I shall return!”
     
20. (1881) Pablo Picasso: “1 is a prime, 2 is a prime, 3 is a prime, 4 is a prime ... Give me a museum and I’ll fill it!”
     
21. (1887) Erwin Schrφdinger: “3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, and 7 is a prime,  however, 9 has a dual prime-composite state that can collapse to one side or the other depending on the observer’s cat.”
     
22. (1889) Charlie Chaplin: “3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 9 is the next prime after 8.”
     
23. (1910) Mother Teresa: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime,  and 9 is prime, but all of them are orphans.”
     
24. (1917) John F. Kennedy: “1 is not a prime number and 9 is not a prime number? Then ask not what the primes can do for you, ask what you can do for the primes.”
     
25. (1918) Evangelist Billy Graham: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime,  9 is an unfortunate mistake of the devil. But if it repents, it will be saved!”
     
26. (1926) Fidel Castro: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 and 9 are primes. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.”
     
27. (1929) Martin Luther King: “What? You say that 2 is the only even prime number? I have a dream that one day this number will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self evident that all numbers are created equal.”
     
28. (1930) Hugh Everett: “3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, and 7 is a prime, but 9 may also be prime in some other alternate universe.”
     
29. (1942) Stephen Hawking: “2, 3, 5 and 7 are prime numbers: 9 is not prime, but in the black holes, past beyond the event horizon, anything can happen.”
     
30. (1946) George W. Bush: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, and 9 … well, any odd number can be prime as long as it is not 9.”

Notes:

¹    Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Multiple entities should not be used unless necessary. This refers to that in science, the less the postulates the better.

²    E pluribus unum. We are one in the plurality.

E. Pιrez 
Nov-08

This article of mine was originally published in Paradox, a students magazine of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Melbourne, Australia, in the Issue Number 1 of 2007. I retouched it a little for the Web version.