Forget 24. Check out 23! 23 is a fascinating number, a significant figure in fact. First off, it is a prime number. A number that can only be divided by itself and the number 1 to give a whole number answer. It’s also the smallest prime number consisting of numbers in ascending sequential order. Strangely, if you ask someone to think of a prime number, 23, is the most common answer. There have been dozens of movies featuring the number 23 in their titles, for instance, a 1998 German movie called simply 23 and the Jim Carrey flick The Number 23, but IMDB cites almost 100 (many of the titles use the 23rd of the month while others are more focused on the number itself). Staying with the movies, John Forbes Nash, the subject of the Ron Howard movie A Beautiful Mind was apparently obsessed with the number 23.

For more on the wonders of 23 check out this recent article from the Belfast Telegraph, although after a serious start it begins looking for links to 23 in 9/11, The Bible, the works of the Knights Templar and beyond, I’m surprised Dan Brown doesn’t get a nod in there too.

But, back to the significance of 23, as one of an infinite number of prime numbers it represents a numerical building block alongside its fellow primes. Finding ever larger primes is at the heart of keeping secrets as calculating large primes is so difficult even with powerful computers that if you find one you can use it as an encryption key without fear of anyone else being able to figure out your code…unless they too have an array of Cray super computers.

If you fancy being a millionaire though, and realize that the odds of winning the lottery are billions to one against, then you could do worse than solve the Riemann hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that there might be a hidden pattern in the primes. The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) has put up a $1 million prize money to the first person to find the pattern as part of its Millennium Prize Problems (discussed blog style here). If there is a pattern then finding ever larger primes will become almost a trivial task, but will negate the cryptographic potential of those large primes.