What 6-7,' demons and The Big Bang Theory tell us about prime numbers

"Prime numbers are like the atoms of mathematics: they are the indivisible building blocks from which all other numbers are composed. For millennia, these numbers, divisible only by 1 and themselves, have fascinated humankind. They guard many secrets, including how they are distributed on the number line, and efforts to identify more and more primes have occupied generations of scholars."

"In episode 73 of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, physicist Sheldon Cooper asks his friends for the best number. Cooper then shares his pick of 73. His reasons: 73 is the 21st prime number; its reverse, 37, is the 12th prime number; and the product of 7 and 3 is 21. A few years after the episode aired in 2010, mathematician Christopher Spicer of what is now Morningside University (then Morningside College) wondered if there were more Sheldon primes that shared these properties."

"In 2015 he worked with two of his then students, Jessie Byrnes and Alyssa Turnquist, to search the first 10 million prime numbers; they found no other Sheldon prime among them. The trio shared their findings in an article in Math Horizons called The Sheldon Conjecture. Three years later, in 2019, Spicer and Carl Pomerance, a number theorist at Dartmouth College, showed conclusive proof that the Sheldon prime was unique. First, the researchers showed that there can be no Sheldon prime larger than 10. While 10 is unimaginably large, it is nonetheless a finite value, which means, in principle, a compu"

Prime numbers serve as fundamental indivisible elements of mathematics, divisible only by 1 and themselves, and their distribution remains a central mathematical question. Euclid proved that infinitely many primes exist. Three extraordinary primes are highlighted, including the Sheldon prime: 73 is the 21st prime, its reverse 37 is the 12th prime, and the product of its digits (7×3) equals 21. Christopher Spicer and two students searched the first ten million primes without finding another Sheldon prime and published their findings. Later, Spicer and Carl Pomerance produced a proof demonstrating the Sheldon prime is unique and excluded larger Sheldon primes.

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