Emirp, and The Love Affair of Numbers

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The debate on letters  vs numbers will continue but while words can express emotions, the sheer beauty of numbers can leave you speechless. For example there is no known pattern for prime numbers and remains a mystery that humanity has not deciphered ever since they were discovered 2000 years ago. 

They are indestructible, irreducible, but when combined produce a natural even number. You never know when the next prime numbers will come up and suddenly you will see them coming in pairs separated by an even number (11 an 13, 41and 43, 137 and 139). Is there any parallel to this in letters?

Like with words there are palindromes, "racecar" for example, there are "emirp" ('prime' spelt backwards) numbers which we call as a mirror primes. If a number is prime, and the number written in a reverse order is also prime, it is called as  a "mirror prime". For example 13, 31. 


Numbers share a love relationship too, and their love affair is no secret. We humans join their love, with our own tokens like the one below. "Siempre Contigo"... Always with you...

Here is the story that illustrates it:

Mathematician Ramanujam didn’t have any close friends and someone asked him the reason.

He replied that although he wanted to have close friends but nobody was up to his expectations.

When pressed how he expected his friend to be,  he replied, like numbers 220 and 284

The person got confused and asked what is the connection between friendship and these numbers!

Ramanujam asked him to find the divisors of each number! 

With much difficulty, the person derived and listed them as, 

220 → 1,2,4,5,10,11,20,22, 44, 55,110,220

284 →1,2,4,71,142,284

Ramanujam then asked the person to exclude the numbers 220 and 284 and asked the sum of the remaining divisors.

The person was astonished to find,

220 → 1+2+4+5+10+11+20+22+44+55+110=284

284  1+2+4+71+142=220

Ramanujam explained that an ideal friendship should be like these numbers, to complement each other. Even when one is absent, the other should represent the friend!



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