WARNING - This document contains satire, known to the state of California to be politically incorrect and capable of inducing giggles in readers.
William A. Dembski, a Baylor University professor in the Institute for Faith and Learning, has stunned the mathematical world with his claim to have factored the number 59. Prime numbers, those positive integers divisible without remainder only by the number 1 and themselves, have long fascinated mathematicians. While other number theorists have contented themselves with checking very large numbers for being non-prime, Dembski has studied the relatively small integers already thought to be well characterized.
"It all came about while I was working on an example of a Design Inference(TM) made in the movie, 'Contact'. They described receiving a repeating message composed of the prime numbers through 101. I realized that while most people thought that 59 was prime, it really wasn't, and so I left it out of my example," said Dembski. Dembski's modesty has caused some to question whether the missing prime might simply have been an error on Dembski's part.
"My critics think that perhaps I just slipped up," said Dembski with a grin. "As usual, they have not tracked my argument and are in any case too ignorant of mathematics to be considered credible. I said that the specification for the bit string I published was the unary encoding of prime numbers up to 89 in sequence and 59 isn't in there, is it? If 59 were prime, then what I said would not be a specification, and this one of three examples that I've done the probability calculation for in the past six years would be down the drain. That's two years of work. I wouldn't make that kind of mistake."
Previous mathematical convention, dating back at least to the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes in the third century BC, has held that 59 is prime. Stunned colleagues asked to comment have been cautious in affirming Dembski's result. "I have been read-ing Dembski's dis-cussion, but I am find-ing it rough go-ing," said Stephen Hawking, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Oxford University. "I am a-fraid my math is a bit too weak to assess Dembski's no-tation all in one go." Ilya Prigogine offered the comment, "I have to hand it to Dembski. This shows that no matter what you think you know, it always pays to check the details." In a specially conducted seance, Isaac Newton displayed his usual pique. "Dembski has already been called the me of information theory. Now he is branching out into number theory. This is intolerable. Simply intolerable. Excuse me, I have to go spin now."