# Five Minutes of Prime Time

DevFeed: [Five Minutes of Prime Time](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/five-minutes-of-prime-time-37667.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://susam.net/five-minutes-of-prime-time.html>)

Published: 2026-05-16T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Susam Pal](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/susam-pal.md>)

Topics: [Mathematics](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/mathematics.md>)

Tags: [games](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/games.md>), [mathematics](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/mathematics.md>), [mobile](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/mobile.md>), [number](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/number.md>), [puzzles](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/puzzles.md>), [rsa](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/rsa.md>)

## AI overview

A personal story about nerd culture at RSA, including mathematics and physics forums, monthly team challenges, and a five-minute contest to write as many prime numbers between 1 and 1000 as possible.

## Source excerpt

Let me share a very silly story from roughly 18 years ago! In 2008, I joined RSA, the network security company named after the initials of the inventors of the RSA algorithm, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, who were also the founders of RSA, the company. There was a bit of a nerd culture in the workplace where topics like prime numbers, combinatorics, probability theory, etc. were discussed fervently. A prime-number employee number was considered a lucky charm. I had a rather nice large five-digit prime number as my employee number, which I remember being quite pleased about. There were internal forums for almost all kinds of topics. A few I remember fondly were a mathematics forum where colleagues would challenge each other with mathematical puzzles and a similar physics forum where, for some reason, crafting contrived paradoxes using special and general relativity and putting them up for debate was a common activity. The participants would analyse each paradox to determine if it truly was one or if it could be resolved into something that was no longer a paradox. I loved hanging out on those forums and made many friends there. The mathematics forum, in particular, gave me plenty of fun problems to think about. In fact, my Langford Pairing (2011) post was the result of a question I had stumbled upon there. The human resources (HR) department used to organise afternoon games once every month where people would self-organise into teams and solve a small challenge. There was a cash prize for the winning team each time. The HR folks were very well aware of the nerd culture and the fascination with prime numbers, but they probably did not know enough about exactly what type of problems we were fascinated with. So in one of the monthly game events, the HR team gave us this challenge. Write as many prime numbers between 1 and 1000 as you can in 5 minutes. The 5-minute timer started immediately. Really, that was the challenge. We all looked at each other in surprise, wondering