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O'Toole never fully comprehended what exactly was meant by the expression "quadratic prime." However, he did understand, and was fascinated by, the fact that the string 41, 43, 47, 53, 61, 71, 83, 97, where each successive number was computed by increasing the difference from the previous number by two, resulted in exactly forty consecutive prime numbers.. The sequence of primes ended only when the forty-first number in the srting turned out to be a non prime, namely 41 X 41 = 1681. This little know piece of information O'Toole had shared only one time in his life, with his wife Kathleen on her forty-first birthday, and he had received such a lackluster response that he never told anybody about it again.
weslaaaaay: Arthur C. Clark at his best.
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