10.01.08
I’ve run out of fingers and toes to count on
This is (in case anyone is confused) a language blog. But for the moment, let’s stop doing the English and start doing the math. From a recent news story:
Mathematicians in California could be in line for a $100,000 prize (£54,000) for finding a new prime number which has 13 million digits.
Prime numbers can be divided only by themselves and one.
Not that I’m truly fretting about it, but let’s consider the goal of this contest. Was the goal set out as “Find a new prime number” (with this story reporting the successful discovery of one that involved 13 million digits)? Or was it set out “Find a new prime number with 13 million digits, no more and no less” (which the California math geeks have discovered)? I suspect the former—in which case, a little comma would have clarified.
“A new prime number which has 13 million digits,” without a comma after number, seems restrictive in the way that saying “a new prime number that has 13 million digits” would restrict. I think I perceive it this way because of the function of sound and timing a comma introduces in such situations, in that restrictive clauses beginning with that aren’t preceded with a comma, while nonrestrictive clauses beginning with which are.
I say, couldn’t a number with 13 million digits have been able to lend a comma to that sentence? Not one?
By the way, a bit of word history that you will see on the bullshitternet soon because I’m making it up: The term “prime number” derives from the financial world. It is created by adding 1 to the “sub-prime number”—the number of dollars involved in the recently proposed government bailout of collapsing sub-prime-deluded banks, which also involves 13 million digits.
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