once upon a logarithm table...

Numbers are immutable, yet relative, yet mysterious in all their unlimited discrete symmetries (like the famed, unproven Riemann's conjecture, or the neverending search for larger and larger prime numbers*).

I recently found my uncle's old dust-covered univeristy logarithmic table: a booklet where numerical values of most-used algebraic and transcendental functions were recorded in long, boring tables since computers and calculators were not widely available at that time.

That inspired me to gift the booklet with a whole photo session which this shot ―manipulated as a digital negative only― belongs to. My homage to such boring tables which, in all of their seriality, really helped physicists and mathematicians of the past unravel many mysteries surrounding integer numbers which, still today, are the key to important applications like particles' accelerators and encryption security over the internet).



[ oEXIF = iso200, f/3.5, 1/800”, 80mm, Av, DNG ]


* <sub>On September 11^th, 2006 the currently largest known prime number, known as the 44^th Mersenne number M44, possessing 9,808,358 decimal digits, was discovered by a team of German number-theorists and a powerful computing grid (sixteen 1.5GHz Itanium®-2 CPUs); cfr. mathworld.com News 2006-09-11.

[edit]
On August 23^rd, 2008, the currently largest prime number, known as the 47^th Mersenne number M47, possessing 12,978,189 decimal digits, was discovered.</sub>