1,000,000,000,000,066,600,000,000,000,001 is a prime number.
It's unusual for at least two reasons. First, it's a palindrome, so it reads the same backwards as forwards (not counting the commas). Second, it has a 666 in the middle, which is a number associated with the Mark of the Beast in the Bible's Book of Revelation.
The number was discovered by Harvey Dubner (1928–2019), "a mathematician known for his discoveries of many large prime numbers and prime number forms," as reported in Wikipedia.
Math aficionado (and early Boing Boing contributor Clifford Pickover) has named the number Belphegor's Prime:
In demonology, Belphegor (or Beelphegor) is a demon.
The creature is one of the seven princes of Hell
and helps people make discoveries.
In John Milton's Paradise Lost,
Belphegor is one of the "Principalities of the Prime."
In hell, Belphegor is the demon of inventiveness.
The symbol for Belphegor's Prime is an upside-down Greek letter π.
I was hoping that 1,000,000,000,000,099,900,000,000,000,001 was also prime since that would mean it was a prime when it was turned upside down. So I made a web app to test for primes. Its factors are: 11 × 90,909,090,909,099,990,909,090,909,091.
I've made the Prime Number Tester accessible to all subscribers to the Premium, ad-free version of Boing Boing. Please subscribe to support Boing Boing for more goodies to come!
