Inaugural Post

My girlfriend Jasmine is a Black nerd like me though not the exact same kind.  You see in Black nerdism all members have a focus.  There are Star Wars nerds, Star Trek nerds, sports nerds, politics nerds, so on and so forth.  It's very similar to having a major in college.  I, on one hand, am a food, sports, and movie nerd.  She is an engineering nerd which is arguably the nerdiest of the nerdy.  She always wants to explain to me how something works or how it is constructed.  I have had more conversations about bridges, tunnels, and construction than I would ever care to admit.  But I digress.  The point is Jasmine is a very important part of my life and I want to dedicate this inaugural post to something I'm sure she would appreciate.  Math.  I first heard this story on This American Life.

This story starts with something people generally don't find that interesting:  prime numbers.  Prime numbers are numbers that are only divisible by themselves (3, 5, 7, 11).  Uclid theorized that there were an infinite amount of prime numbers but he gave no formula to support his theory.  Marin Mersenne, a French monk from the early 17th century, had a formula that he thought could predict prime numbers.  One of the prime numbers derived from his formula was 2 to the 67th power minus 1.  It eventually became known as Mersennes number and was embraced by the mathematics community as true.  Fast forward 250 years to 1903, an American mathematician named Frank Nelson Cole attended a meeting of the American Mathematical Society.  He is scheduled to do a presentation on the "factorization of large numbers" but what actually happened was a lot cooler than that.

For you Lovely.