Richard Evan Schwartz
1-100 Factored: Information
Poster Explanation
The numbers 2,3,4,5,6,... can be classified into
two types,
primes and composites. A composite
is a number
which
can be expressed as the product of two
smaller numbers
on the list. For instance, 6 and
18 are composites because
6=2 x 3 and
18=3 x 6. A prime is a number which is
not
composite. The first few primes are
2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19.
Every
composite can be written as the product
of two or
more primes.
For instance, 120=2 x 2 x 2 x 3 x 5.
Writing a composite in this way is called
factoring it.
The poster illustrates the idea of factoring through
the use
of
cartoon characters. Each prime-numbered block in
the
poster shows a cartoon character who has some
feature
related to that prime. For instance, the
girl in block-7 has
a 7-sided head. Sometimes
the relation between the
character and the number is
a bit hard to find, as in
block-19. (In this block
the green face has 19 sides, 6
on the outside
and 13 more around the eyes.) Each
composite numbered block shows a scene involving the
characters corresponding to the
primes which occur
when the composite is
factored. For instance, block-14
shows the
girl from block-7 munching on the bee from
block-2,
because 14=2 x 7. The cartoon characters are
sometimes drawn differently in different squares; this
is part of the fun and challenge of the poster.
publication history
The poster was one of
the finalists in the 2003 N.S.F.
Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge
The poster appeared in print, in Joy Hakim's book
The story of science
(Smithsonian Books, 2004)
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