A fun prime problem I saw in an Evelyn Lamb tweet

Saw this sequences of tweets because of Evelyn Lamb yesterday:

The answer is bigger than I would have guessed! https://t.co/ann2pFlANf

— Evelyn Lamb (@evelynjlamb) June 1, 2016

https://twitter.com/timricchuiti/status/738038806230802433

It was a fun problem to play around with and, frankly, solving it was the most impressive thing I did at the gym today so I’ve got that going for me . . . .

My younger son was home sick today, but he was feeling better this afternoon so I thought it would be interested to see what he thought about the problem. It turned into a really nice talk about numbers and arithmetic.

Here’s the introduction to the problem and his first 5 minutes of work:

 

and here’s his work up to the solution:

 

This is a really great problem to get kids talking about numbers, arithmetic, and primes. Testing whether the various multiples of 6 are near a prime is a good challenge for kids, too!