A terrific prime number question from Matt Enlow

A great question from Matt Enlow inspired a super fun conversation with the boys last night:

There are 39 days in 2017 that I either was, or will be, a prime number of days old. How well can my age be estimated from this? #mathchat

— Matt Enlow (@CmonMattTHINK) April 24, 2017

Before diving in to the project, I’d really recommend thinking about the question – even just for a few seconds – just to see what your intuition tells you.

We started the project by looking at the tweet and trying to make sure that the boys understood the question. The question itself was harder for them to understand than I expected. One reason was that they weren’t used to thinking about ages in terms of days.

Next we went to Mathematica and wrote a little program using the “PrimePi” function which tells you the number of primes less than or equal to a number.

We played around a little bit. Their initial instinct was to zoom in on a specific number like 30 years old. There were some fun surprises since the number of primes between two numbers bounces around a bit. They also had some really interesting ideas about prime numbers.

Eventually they decided to check a range of ages.

At the end of the last video we decided to check a range of ages, and we did that with a “For” loop. Once we did that we found a couple of really fun surprises 🙂

Running the program over night, the largest age that I found was 179,676 years old! I doubt that’s the highest number, though, and I love that the boys thought that there might be infinitely many solutions to this problem.

Thanks to Matt Enlow for posing this problem!