| Contributed by
"William E. Emba"
"A creature of vast powers is locked up inside a vault made up of
ultimate metal. The key to freeing it turns out to be 'factoring
the ultimate prime number', which procedure is given an extended
pseudomathematical explanation. (Of course, this is all deliberate
1940 goshwow gibberish.)" |
Originally published in Astounding (1940), it has since been
reproduced in several van Vogt collections. | Contributed by
Anonymous
I enjoyed Vault of the Beast very much. It was probably the best SF read of my otherwise misspent youth.
|
| Contributed by
Anonymous
230,584,300,921,393,951 = 7 * 103 * 1,827,673 * 174,983,047
Is there any information about why van Vogt chose this number and said it was prime?
If so, please add something to the story's page.
|
I have no actual information to share, but am conceited enough to share my baseless speculations: The author had the idea of writing a story about "the ultimate prime number". He wanted to include the number in the story but did not actually know of any large primes. I hypothesize that he made this number up essentially randomly, checking only with well-known "tricks" that it is not divisible by 2, 3 or 5. He would have had no reason to think it was really prime. In 1940, it would have been very difficult to determine whether 230,585,300,921,393,951 was a prime number, and so he could be relatively confident that none of the readers of the story would know he was (probably) lying.
Does anyone else have a better answer to this anonymous guest's question?
|
