The Prime of Mr. Hirak Parikh

At exactly 2245 EST, which is 0815 IST, the digits on my clock will flip. No ordinary flip this one. Thirty rotations round the sun to be exact. In a sense it's just another day, right? That was pretty much the whole point of James Joyce's Ulysses (He did take his time to describe it though). The beauty of an ordinary day. Unlike Stephen Daedalus, I am trying to confront the possibility of an extraordinary day.

But why 30? Technically speaking it's the 30th anniversary, but my 31st birthday (0-based counting rocks!). On some level, it's special, though in terms of other units of time counted it's rather quotidian -
* it is 10,956 days, 15 hours, 45 minutes and 0 seconds or
* 29 years, 11 months, 29 days, 15 hours, 45 minutes
* 946,655,100 seconds
* 15,777,585 minutes
* 262,959 hours (rounded down)
* 1565 weeks (rounded down)
Courtesy: www.timeanddate.com

Then again, in term of SI units - another day to celebrate is 1E9 seconds on the planet which is about 31.6887646 years. So, somewhere in February 2012? For most people their billionth second on earth passes by in an instant, without fanfare or even the slightest notice. Given that our lives revolve on the order of days, this significant moment just passes by. I can take solace in the fact, that I am not that old, yet!

Still 30 is unique not because it signals the end of the 20s, or the end of my salad days, but for a curious fact that '30' is the largest possible product of first few consecutive primes.
1x2x3x5=30.

The next possible combination is 1x2x3x5x7=210 which seems out of the realm of human longevity.

I take this as divine sign from the God of Numbers that this year is the prime(s) of my life. So the BIG '3 and 0' is really an important marker.

Goodbye 20s, Welcome Hirak 3.0.

Bad news: More grey hair
Good news: We are out of beta. Way, way out of beta...

3 comments:

Wavefunction said...

Happy Birthday! If by "way out of beta" you mean beta-amyloid, that's good news!

Adi said...

30 years on the planet and you don't even get the basic fact about prime numbers correct.

1 is NOT a prime

Very disappointing.

Happy B'day.

hirak said...

Wavefunction: Old, but not that old...

Adi: Yes, but certainly old enough to forget that 'two distinct divisors are needed'. Post has been corrected to be mathematically correct. :)