{ "item_title" : "A Big Prime Number", "item_author" : [" Jason Probert "], "item_description" : "This is a book about one number. A specific number. A number with 251,643 digits, no factors worth mentioning, and - if the cover is to be believed - its own gravitational field.The entire text of this book is that number: 43 x 2 835934 + 1, a proven prime discovered by Curtis Cooper in 2006, printed here in full and set like a novel across a hundred and fifty pages. Read aloud at two digits a second it runs about thirty-five hours. Every digit has to be exactly what it is. Change any one of the 251,643 and it almost certainly stops being prime. There are no typos in this book, because a typo would make it a different book.Between the digits are 43 true stories. Each begins in real mathematics and does not stop there - it keeps going, past the proof and into the person it happened to. A duel at dawn. A serial killer's cipher. A bug that cost Intel half a billion dollars. A prisoner, a monk, a teenager, a spy. A friar who in 1640 ran what was effectively a distributed computing project using candlelight and the postal service. All documented, told with their uncertainties intact, and all about people who gave real pieces of their lives to numbers exactly like this one.The number was prime before the Earth was here and nothing has happened to it since. Every date in this book is a date on which a human being learned something; nothing has ever happened to the number itself. It was known the way a mountain can be mapped without being climbed - through formulas, tests and proofs, by people who never had a reason to look at its digits.This is very possibly the first time it has been laid out whole, for a pair of human eyes.Yours.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/899/754/9798997541712_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "23.99", "online_price" : "23.99", "our_price" : "23.99", "club_price" : "23.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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