Caitlin Woodward

Super Prime Phone Number

At work, we were designing some new business cards for me (more on that later!), when I decided that I wanted to put my mobile number on there, but not my actual cell phone number. So I decided that I was going to try and start using a Google Voice local number to forward to my cell, that way I can see which number is being called. Anyway. So the trick now is, what phone number to pick?

I can't just pick a number. It has to have something cool about it.

The obvious 314.159.2653 was taken. So was 271.828.1828. That's okay, though, I wanted a 901 area code anyway. I was also a little sad to discover that area codes started at 201, which completely ruined my ability to get a binary phone number. Then I could tell people, "Oh yeah, my phone number is 153". It would've been great. Then I got the idea that maybe I could do something in octal (or hex, and just tweak it so that it didn't use a-f). I played around with options for a while, and gave up on that idea also. I finally decided that prime numbers were cool.

(I don't know the names for the anatomy of a phone number, so use xxx.yyy.zzzz as a reference.)

I knew I wanted an area code of 901, so I wanted to find a prime number between 9010000000 and 9020000000. Alright, cool. I looked around at Google Voice numbers, and found some the most common yyy's. For Midtown, they were 213, 214, and 257; among some others scattered, but I figured these would work well enough.

I wrote a script to find me all the primes between 9012130000 and 9012150000 (I changed these to search for yyy = 257 in a different run). It only took a few seconds and found quite a bit. Cool, but then I had to pick one. I decided that there needed to be more uniqueness to it, then just the whole number being a prime.

So I modified the script to find me all the prime numbers in that boundary where xxx.yyy.zzzz AND yyy.zzzz AND zzzz were all primes. And it found me less than 30. All that was left was to pick one that looked cool and flowed well when spoken. The one I picked had only one even numbered digit, sadly there was no phone number in 901 that was completely odd numbered digits. But I was happy.

And that's the story behind my super prime phone number.