Message to all those people in college who wondered what Mark and I talk about behind closed doors: Yes, it really is exactly what you think it is.

Breakfast conversation:

Mark:   Is there something called the Mercene primes, or the Marecene primes?

Me:   Mercenne primes.  Um, they're of the form 2n+1 I think.  No wait, that's just an odd number.  Um...

Mark:  Is it two to the power of n plus 1?

Me:  That sounds right.  I forget.  (Note:  I was wrong, it's two to the power of P minus 1 where, by implication, P is also prime.  See, e.g., the Mersenne Wiki, or this page by an enthusiast/researcher at the University of Tennessee-Martin.)  Anyway, google Mersenne series.  Why do you want to know, anyway?

Mark:  In case anybody asks me how many children we plan to have. 

Me:  Oh, I see. "Four, plus or minus two, with ninety-five percent confidence," doesn't work anymore. 

Mark:  Right, so I figured I would go with "I don't care as long as it's a Mersenne prime."  One, five, eleven, and so forth.

Me:  Don't you think the Fibonacci series would be better?

Mark:  Why?

Erin:  Well, at least with Fibonacci we haven't made any mistakes yet.  First we had one, then we had two, now we're going to have three.

Mark:  Ah-ha!  I can say that we are having an ongoing argument about it.  "Erin prefers the Fibonacci series, but I am shooting for the Mersenne primes."

Erin:  Well, you know, they start out pretty close---

Mark: ---but they diverge wildly after a while!  Yes!

Erin:  I don't know about this "eleven" thing. 

You can imagine my relief when I clicked around and discovered that eleven is not, actually, a Mersenne prime.  (Of course, I had to send an e-mail to Mark at work with the subject line "URGENT:  MERSENNE PRIMES," lest he make a fool of himself describing our family planning strategy to some product formulator who turned out to be a closet GIMPS enthusiast.)

UPDATE:  This post seems to have inspired some commentary elsewhere --- see, e.g., Rutabaga Dreams.  And Selkie, which seems to be a pretty cool homeschooling mom blog too.

Comments

[Mrs. Dr. P]

High-larious!! I'm glad to hear that other married couples have nerd conversations. (Nerd conversation = any conversation that requires the internet to complete.) When we were first married, we would tell people 2-9. It's amazing that people always ask. If I were you, I'd give them a number one less than you currently have, just to confuse them. Ask if they think the hospital accepts returns.

[Valerie]

Too, too funny! Too bad I'm not scientific enough to carry off that response to throw people off. Oh well!

[daughterofstjohn]

ROTFL, that is too funny. I'm glad I'm not the only one that has nerdy conversations. Mine aren't with my hubby though, uh oh....

[bearing]

MrsDrP: Thanks for the definition of "nerd conversation." Unfortunately, it seems that most of my conversations fit that definition.

DaughterofStjohn: Scandalous!

[Suzi]

That is hilarious. And my boys think our family's conversations are odd!

We never had this question arise. But when I was pregnant with a baby, we did have several people ask us if we knew how that happened. (Relevant to your contraception and continuum article, maybe they really believed we didn't know.)

Once my husband decided that the next person to ask that question was going to get, "No. Could you explain it to us?" as an answer, we never got another question.

So, my theory is that once you have a good answer, no one asks the question again.

[CityMom]

This is great. People usually ask us "when are you going to have another baby?"

My (charming) husband has taken to answering "Nine months from tonight if you'll babysit!"

Also, to the sarcastic question "so, how many kids do you have now?" He says "I think around four, but I try to not keep track."

[Layla]

What a delightful post (And Dr. Caldwell at UTM is awesome--I'm not a math person, so I haven't had him as a professor, but he's a very neat person).

[pxonagzal]

hilary duff with no clothes on