Martin Geisler Online

Last Monday I finished by big Danish paper on Mersenne primes, or Mersenne primtal as it’s called in Danish.

I made it to my school only ten minutes before the deadline, because it took over an hour to print the darn thing! I had underestimated the printing, because when I printed it during the week, I only printed the important pages, and skipped the title page, the table of contents, the appendix etc. But with all those pages the report is 36 pages long, and since I have to print at “Best” quality on my Deskjet 970Cxi it took a loong time to print… But I made it — with time to spare :-)

I’ve put the paper up in the Danish section of my site, so that you can take a look. You’ll find several different formats to choose from, so everybody should have a chance. But if your browser can’t display the image above, in PNG format, then don’t bother trying the HTML versions. Due to patent problems, all the images are in PNG format.

Since I’m writing my big assignment on Mersenne primes this week, I’m likely to be offline for some time. If I have to attend my Inbox every 30 minutes, I’ll never get any work done, so I’ll probably kill my fetchmail daemon after the system is started.

Yesterday was my birthday — I turned 19. I got some nice presents, like a new chair for my computer and a fancy wall-mountable CD-holder. I also got some money, which I’ve spend on a new quiet power-supply and a CPU cooler. When I bought my Athlon, I also had to buy a new power-supply, a 300W. But that was just a “normal” (read: noisy) one. These new quiet components, have reduced the noise-level significantly around my computer.

I was woke up to the sound of my clock-radio 30 minutes ago. I then stood up, just to realize that my first class starts at 10 o’clock today :-) But now that I’m up anyway, I might aswell use the time.

Next week I’ll be busy writing a large paper on Mersenne primes. All students in the Danish gymnasium have to make a big report every year. In the first form you write in Danish, in the second you write in history, and in the third and final form, you can choose among those subjects you’ve had in all three years. For me, that is Danish, math, and physics.

I’ve chosen to write about Mersenne primes (in mathematics). I get the exact assignment on Monday, and then I have one week for the writing. It’s going to be exciting — I’ve been polishing off my LaTeX-skills for the last couple of weeks for the job :-)