Today I worked on some interesting applied exercises in the review of conics, as well as finishing a problem set in Analysis with an Introduction to Proof. I also spent some time thinking about a challenge problem that I found copied into one of my notebooks:
Problem of the Week #793 by Stan Wagon
A superprime is an integer (such s 7331) such that all of its left-to-right initial segments are prime. (For 7331, the segments are 7, 73, 733, and 7331, all prime.) There is largest superprime. Find it.1
I had done some work on the problem during one of my abortive stabs at doing math again. My approach was to try to prove that there is a largest superprime as a step toward constructing it. The work I did to that end is interesting, but I don’t know yet whether I can get beyond the place I got stuck before. Possibly finding the largest superprime empirically, then proving that it must be the largest would be more fruitful.
- To do. ↩︎
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