now, there's that 44th mersenne prime again. it's amazing that although we may have been aware of the primes for 20,000 years, so much about them remains unresolved. patterns have been observed, but we can't be sure the patterns continue on the number line out into infinity. we found the 44th mersenne prime, but we don't even know if it's the last one or if the pattern goes on forever. what's more, the mersenne prime is just one kind of pattern we can find. now, take a look at the first few primes. we see several examples of "twin primes," pairs of primes that are just two units apart: 3 and 5, 5 and 7, 11 and 13. and now we go farther and farther: 827 and 829, 1,607 and 1,609, and so on and so on... maybe. is there an infinite number of twin primes? that question was posed by euclid 2,300 years ago, and to this day still, no one has been able to either prove or disprove his twin prime conjecture. an infinite number of primes, perhaps an infinite number of twin primes. small primes, huge primes. short gaps between primes, some v