At the ams.org, and many other places (including GIMPS), the phrase "The Largest Known Prime" is used repeatedly. There must be some other way to report Mersenne prime progress without using this unfortunate phrase, which finds itself into the media and can be easily misconstrued as "Largest Prime Found." I don't have a good replacement though. Maybe just "Larger" instead? David Gale wrote:
The quote below appeared in a column in the International Herald Tribune by Michael Johnson described as "a former correspondent for Business Week and The Associated Press." The column head was "2,3,5,7,1,13,,19,23 What comes next?" The article was about the search for a ten million digit prime.
About halfway down we find, "It was Euclid who started it all by identifying the smaller primes 2,300 years ago and /predicting /that the number of primes would / turn out/ to be infinite [my italics] ."
I don't know, wouldn't you think even the man or woman on the street should be able to digest Euclid's proof? I'm tempted to go out on the street and try to find out. "Look, Mary, suppose there were only a zillion of them. Well then, multiply them all together and add 1and you see . . . " What do you all think?
David G
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