Total score = 10 poinrs. Show all your work on this sheet.
On November 17, 2003 Michael Shafer's computer found the 40th
known Mersenne prime, 220,996,011-1! This number "weighs
in" at a whopping 6,320,430 decimal digits! At that time, it was also
the largest known prime number.
Call this number p. How did we know there must be prime
numbers even larger than p?
Use the Pythagorean "triangular number" construction to
show that the sum of the integers from 1 to 17 is (17x18)/2.
Show how this construction is really the same as Gauss'
argument: