Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Goodbye to 2017, a Prime, Sexy, Odious Year

For math geeks, 2018 is looking a little less interesting.

December 29, 2017 at 1:00 PM UTC

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

There it goes.
Photographer: Yana Paskova/Getty Images

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The year 2017 has had its ups and downs. Mathematically, however, one thing is certain: The entire year has been prime time.

For a math geek like me, the properties of numbers are a source of excitement and fun. In that spirit, it’s a joy to point out that 2,017 is a prime number — that is, an integer only divisible by 1 and by itself.1514391604712