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"Late last month, Curtis Cooper of the University of Central Missouri moved one small step closer to Euclid's infinity, when he announced that 257,885,161-1 is prime. This is now the largest known prime number, eclipsing the previous record-holder, which had been discovered at UCLA in 2008. The new number has 17,425,170 digits-just writing them down makes for a 22.45-megabyte text file. The UCLA number had knocked an earlier number of Cooper's, from 2006, out of the record books. "

Abstract:"Prime Climb is an educational game that provides individual support for learning number factorization skills in the form of hints based on a model of student learning. Previous studies with Prime Climb indicated that students may not always be paying attention to the hints, even when they are justified (i.e. based on a student model's assessment). In this thesis we will discuss the test-bed game, Prime Climb, and our re-implementation of the game which allowed us to modify the game dynamically and will allow for more rapid prototyping in the future. To assist students as they play the game, Prime Climb includes a pedagogical agent which provides individualized support by providing user-adaptive hints. We then move into our work with the eye-tracker to better understand if and how students process the agent's personalized hints. We will conclude with a user study in which we use eyetracking data to capture user attention patterns as impacted by factors related to existing user knowledge, hint types, and attitude towards getting help in general. We plan to leverage these results in the future to make hint delivery more effective."

Computer visualization, "For each natural number n, we draw a periodic curve starting from the origin, intersecting the x-axis at n and its multiples. The prime numbers are those that have been intersected by only two curves: the prime number itself and one."

"Mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto University in Japan has released a 500-page proof of the abc conjecture, which proposes a relationship between whole numbers - a 'Diophantine' problem. The abc conjecture, proposed independently by David Masser and Joseph Oesterle in 1985, might not be as familiar to the wider world as Fermat's Last Theorem, but in some ways it is more significant. "The abc conjecture, if proved true, at one stroke solves many famous Diophantine problems, including Fermat's Last Theorem," says Dorian Goldfeld, a mathematician at Columbia University in New York. "If Mochizuki's proof is correct, it will be one of the most astounding achievements of mathematics of the twenty-first century." See additional commentary at: http://bit-player.org/2012/the-abc-game?utm_src=HN2

Exploration of a Fermat conjecture on prime numbers

"In this paper, we will describe work that we have done in this direction using as a test-bed an edu-game for number factorization, Prime Climb. This game includes a pedagogical agent that provides adaptive interventions during game playing based on a model of student learning [13, 18]. Here we focus on how we re-implemented the original Prime Climb game into a framework that enables rapid prototyping and testing of different design hypothesis. We also discuss preliminary work on using eye tracking data on user attention patterns to better understand if and how students process the agent‟s adaptive interventions." (from the introduction)

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My Blog About Mathematics and Science as a PDF file on Scribd.com. Articles: Editing Equations on Web 2.0 Sites, Representing Scale in Mathematics, Nesin Mathematics Village in Turkey, A mathematician of prime numbers. A mathematician of topology. Flash game for teaching mathematics. From http://cmcallister.vox.com/

Published 2013 by CRC Press. A collection of essays and stories on mathematics for the general reader, including such topics as mathematicians, mathematical discoveries, prime numbers, puzzles, equations, proofs and the value of mathematics.