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arguchikat a well-attended brunch on saturday, i asked everyone at the table what an irregular prime number is (i know that the first irregular prime is 37, but i don't know why). here's a link to the wiki article on the subject. i can't figure out what the fuck they're talking about. can anyone out there explain this to me in plain english?
some context: i asked about this, because i am teaching an excerpt from ralph ellison's invisible man at the moment--specifically the prologue and the first chapter (which is often anthologized as a stand-alone short story called "battle royal"). in the prologue, the narrator mentions twice that he has exactly 1369 lightbulbs in the "hole" he lives in. i was curious about the number, so i did some quick factoring and figured out that it is the square of 37; and that its only factors are 1, 37, and itself. i wiki'ed the number 37, and that's where i found out that it's the first irregular prime.
some context: i asked about this, because i am teaching an excerpt from ralph ellison's invisible man at the moment--specifically the prologue and the first chapter (which is often anthologized as a stand-alone short story called "battle royal"). in the prologue, the narrator mentions twice that he has exactly 1369 lightbulbs in the "hole" he lives in. i was curious about the number, so i did some quick factoring and figured out that it is the square of 37; and that its only factors are 1, 37, and itself. i wiki'ed the number 37, and that's where i found out that it's the first irregular prime.
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Re: bear with me, it's been a while
Date: 2007-04-11 02:00 pm (UTC)i'm trying to think, now, about why ellison might have been drawing on this mathematical stuff in invisible man, and what it might mean in the context of the novel. ellison studied music at the tuskegee institute--he was going to be a composer, and the novel deals a lot with jazz. i wonder if the bernoulli nmbers have some musical application... i just don't have any information as to whether or not ellison had mathematical training, so this whole thing might just be a coincidence. he does a lot of stuff in the novel with the divisibility, multiplicity, and interpenetrations of blackness and whiteness, too.