Indeed, that's why the Aricebo message used a semiprime for the area. It would be even better if the area were instead p², for prime p, in which case there are only three possibilities (rather than four) for the dimensions. Amazingly, Felix Klein's date of birth consists entirely of squares of primes: 1849-04-25 Sincerely, Adam P. Goucher
On 12/20/10, Adam P. Goucher <apgoucher@gmx.com> wrote:
... (Indeed, I considered that, to send image data to an alien race, this may be the most natural way to do so. With ordinary bitmaps, the aliens will have to guess the dimensions to visualise the image, as was the case for the Aricebo message.)
Of course, this would not be (much of a ) a problem if the raster were instead p x q, for p,q prime ... WFL
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun