A hard day's night of calculation has resulted in an international mathematical triumph for one Dublin numbers wizard - and all just in time for the millennium.
Dr John Cosgrave, a maths lecturer at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, has discovered a prime number - a number divisible by only itself and 1 - with exactly 2,000 digits, quite by accident and while he slept.
Preparing a class for his third-year students, Dr Cosgrave needed to identify "some pretty big primes" to demonstrate the application of the ideas of a little-known English mathematician, Henry Cabourn Pocklington.
"I have a computer that can do these calculations and I set it to calculating large prime numbers," said Dr Cosgrave.
"I started off with my birthday and it found some pretty impressive ones with 900 or so digits, but I wanted to break the 1,000-digit barrier and I was prepared to leave the computer calculating away for a few weeks.
"To my delight however, when I came down the next morning, the computer had broken the 1,000-digit barrier, and oh, how it had! It had discovered a prime number with exactly 2,000 digits."
Bursting with excitement Dr Cosgrave first told his wife, who was apparently unable to generate quite the same enthusiasm. Next he poured his fervour into an e-mail to his young niece, Josephine, and nephew, Ben, in England.
The "millennium prime" may not be the longest prime ever discovered - that one has more than two million digits - nor will it be the last (Euclid proved millenniums ago that there was an infinite number of primes) - but it is the first time its 2,000 digits have been identified and the first time we have been able to look at them.
And look at them is exactly what we will be able to do, because the new prime is to be the focal point of a "high-quality publication" being issued by Connemara-based publisher, Folding Landscapes.
The text of Dr Cosgrave's emails to his niece and nephew will be published over 42 pages under the title A Prime For The Millennium, with each of the 2,000 digits adorning the cover.
All proceeds will go the Irish Cancer Society.
Just 2,000 - suitably enough - copies of A Prime For The Millennium have been published. Priced £13.50, the booklet will be launched in Kenny's Book shop, Galway on Friday, December 3rd. Dr John Cosgrave's homepage is: www.spd.dcu.ie/johnbcos
