Note: I received this email from David Jones after he had observed that Dick Sietz listed facts about the first 31 primes (up to 127) at
http://www.pleacher.com/mp/mfacts/primlist.html
I noticed your prime list of primes goes up to 127.
I was pointed towards an interesting property of this number (127) following some strange phone calls I received at exactly 16:56 on the 24hr clock. That's another story,
kind of, but here's what I noticed...
1656 hrs is 1016 minutes out of 1440 in a day.
Simplified this is:
508/720
Simplified further it is:
254/360 (immediately I thought of the inch (and found another interesting coincidence when I looked closely at the scale of inches and millimeters, namely that 36mm in
inches gives the same number of the ratio 254/360, 1.4173...)...
And finally:
127/180 (talking of scales, 127 degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius also raised an eyebrow) ...
So 1656 hrs is 127/180ths of a day, with 53/180ths left until the next day begins.
One thing I notice about the prime number 127, is that it is the 31st prime...
127 is the 31st prime,
31 is the 11th prime,
11 is the 5th prime,
5 is the 3rd prime,
3 is the 2nd prime,
2 is the 1st prime.
I thought this was a lovely coincidence.
Then I decided to add up the positions of the prime numbers...
1+2+3+5+11+31
I get 53.
Of course then I realized that the only minute displayed on a 24hr clock in the style of HHMM that encodes a straightforward reference to a much maligned number (666) is
1656 (where two sixes are already present and the third can be reached by simple addition of the other two digits).