Sermon Tone Analysis

Persistence > Talent

Maybe you don’t feel like you’re talented.

Perhaps you feel like everyone else seems to have more talent than you.

Maybe that’s why you keep giving up.

Things get hard and you quit, you fizzle out, you give up.

You figure if only you had more talent you would keep going.

Maybe you think that those who succeed do so because they are more talented.

Sure, talent plays a role in success, but I would like to suggest that persistence is actually a bigger factor in determining success than just talent, especially when it comes to the spiritual realm.

Mersenne’s Prime

In 1644, a monk named Marin Mersenne gets obsessed for a while with prime numbers.

You remember prime numbers?

They're like the atoms of math, indivisible.

They cannot be divided by any other number than themselves.

So 3 is a prime number.

You can only divide it by 3. Versus 4, which you can divide by 2, and you can get 2.

Remember?

OK.

So Mersenne had a formula that he thought could predict prime numbers, OK?

Paul Hoffman, who wrote about this in his book The Man Who Loved Only Numbers.

He says that mathematicians had been searching for a formula like this to find prime numbers for nearly 2,000 years at that point.

Euclid, way, way back, 2,300 years ago, had proved that there's an infinite number of prime numbers.

But he gave no formula for how to find them.

I mean, they're easy at small numbers.

We can do the math in our head.

7's prime.

Nothing divides into it.

11's prime.

If I give you a really big number, now you're going to have to start calculating, OK?

So this monk, Mersenne, came up with a formula.

He creates this formula.

And he uses it to spit out prime numbers.

And one of the prime numbers that he said that he discovered was-- and this is going to sound a little bit technical-- 2 raised to the 67th power-- that is, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2, 67 times-- minus 1.

And if that was confusing, all you need to know is this number of Mersenne's, 2 raised to the 67th minus 1, was famous among mathematicians.

That's how his paper ended.

He said it was a prime number.

This is 1644.

So 250 years later, we're into the 20th century.

I think it's 1903.

And you have this mathematician that shows up at a mathematical conference that takes place here in the United States.

His name is Frank Nelson Cole.

And he gave his talk a very unassuming title.

He titled his talk "On the Factorization of Large Numbers."

And he went to a blackboard.

And he wrote, 2 to the 67th minus 1--

He says nothing.

He says not a word.

He just walks over to the blackboard and just, writes that.

And of course, everybody in the audience knows that that's the famous Mersenne prime.

And he writes, equals, and then he writes out a 21-digit number—(2 67 - 1 = 147,573,952,589,676,412,927)

In other words, when you take 2 and then multiply it by 2, 67 times, and then subtract 1, that is this number, 21 digits long.

147,573,952,589,676,412,927.

OK.

Then he moved over to a blank piece of blackboard.

And he wrote down two numbers.

One is a nine-digit number, times a 12-digit number.

He writes those two numbers out.

193,707,721 and 761,838,257,287

OK, so that's two numbers that were sitting there on the board, multiplication problem, and?

And then he did the multiplication, just like the way they taught us back in second grade to do it.

7 times 1, he put down the 7.

He went through the whole thing, step by step.

Just long multiplication.

He says not a word.

Everybody sits there silently.

Now, remember, the whole idea of a prime number is you should not be able to take two numbers, and then multiply them together and get a prime number as a result.

It's supposed to be indivisible.

If you multiplied two numbers together and you got this 21-digit number as a result, then that 21-digit number is not prime.

And if Mersenne thought it was prime-- which he did-- his formula supposedly spits out prime numbers, this one of them, then his formula, 250 years old, is just wrong.

So, picture it.

There's Frank Nelson Cole at the blackboard, slowly doing long multiplication, these two huge numbers.

It takes a while.

They're big numbers.

It takes minutes, as this room full of mathematicians just watches him, lots of them, I'm sure, scrutinizing him for any math errors.

He still has not said a word.

And then, he gets to his result.

And indeed, it ends up being that 21-digit number, 147sextillion, 573quintillion, 952quadrilion, 589trillion, 676billion, 412thousand, 927.

Now, the whole place erupts into applause.

Legend has it, this is the first time at a math conference that people got up and applauded.

And he just returns to his seat without a word.

And then later, someone asked him, "How long did it actually take you to figure out that Mersenne was wrong, that indeed this number has two factors?"

And he said that he spent three years of Sundays working on this.

Three years of Sundays.

Paul says these three years of Sundays were probably spent solving the problem by trying every possible solution-- dividing that huge number, 2 to the 67th power minus 1, by one number and then the next number and then the next.

Three years of Sundays is 156 Sundays.

For 155 of them, Frank Nelson Cole failed.

Until finally, on the 156th Sunday, Frank Nelson Cole found a number that would divide it evenly, which, Paul says, is par for the course.

Notice how we don't talk about the researcher who spent two years trying to find what this gene did and then gave up or spent three years trying to find a planet outside the solar system and gave up, and someone else eventually did.

Progress and discovery are often a combination of insight and hard work.

We talk about the ones who did not give up, the ones who persevered and persisted.

(Adapted From This American Life: TRANSCRIPT 450: So Crazy It Just Might Work Transcript ORIGINALLY AIRED 11.11.2011)

Joseph in Prison

Genesis 39 ended with Joseph being thrown in prison after being falsely accused of attempted rape.

But while Joseph was in prison God blessed him and he became the second in command in the prison (blog post with more details here).

Genesis 40 picks up the story with the addition of two men to the prison.

It came to pass after these things that the butler and the baker of the king of Egypt offended their lord, the king of Egypt. 2 And Pharaoh was angry with his two officers, the chief butler and the chief baker.

3 So he put them in custody in the house of the captain of the guard, in the prison, the place where Joseph was confined.

4 And the captain of the guard charged Joseph with them, and he served them; so they were in custody for a while.

- Genesis 40:1-4 NKJV

I believe it is worthwhile noting that even though Joseph had authority over all the prisoners who were in the prison (Genesis 39:22-23) Joseph did not use his position of authority to take advantage of the prisoners.

Joseph did not “lord it over” them, it is almost as if Joseph had studied Matthew 20:25-28 in his small group meeting.

25 But Jesus called them to Himself and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those who are great exercise authority over them.