From Richard Miller
It’s all very well, bashing the British Medical Journal and Nature for poor statistical practice (5 June, p 19). But in the very same edition you reported that the newly discovered prime 224,036,583-1 was 72 per cent of the size required to claim the $100,000 Electronic Frontier Foundation prize (p 7).
What I think you meant was that it has 72 per cent of the necessary number of digits. The value of the number discovered is in fact about 102,800,000 times smaller than required.
Ferndown, Dorset, UK
