I’ve been looking back on some of my blog posts that included Mathematica code to see whether I could rewrite them using Python. For example, I rewrote my code for finding sonnet primes in Python a few days ago. Next I wanted to try testing the Narcissus prime.
Futility closet describes the Narcissus prime as follows:
Repeat the string 1808010808 1560 times, and tack on a 1 the end. The resulting 15601-digit number is prime, and because it’s a palindrome made up of the digits 1, 8, and 0, it remains prime when read backward, upside down, or in a mirror.
My Mathematica code for verifying this claim is posted here. Here’s Python code to do the same thing:
from sympy.ntheory import isprime isprime(int("1808010808"*1560 + "1"))
This does indeed return True
. However, the Mathematica code ran for about 2 minutes and the SymPy code took 17.5 hours, about 500 times longer.
Update (December 29, 2019): Aaron Meurer reports in the comments that the latest version of SymPy is much faster at solving this problem.