You could always trust a prime

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Seeking stability

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You could always trust a prime

Oliver Sacks Scientist

		Views	Duration
11. Music was a youthful respite from boarding school		812	01:00
12. 'I remember how my ribs stuck out'		741	01:03
13. You could always trust a prime		769	01:01
14. Seeking stability		758	00:15
15. The things boarding school has taken from me		960	01:33
16. Difficulty with human bonding	1	949	00:37
17. Misinterpreting Christopher Rawlence's signals		824	00:26
18. My lack of 'belief'		834	01:07
19. My belief in science		730	01:06
20. 'I'm an old Jewish atheist'		960	00:57

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I think I became, despite Lawrence Greenbaum, rather isolated at school. I don’t recollect any other friends. I do recollect becoming fascinated by numbers, by mental arithmetic and indulging in more and more complex, sort of, puzzles and exercises. I... I often felt that numbers had a real presence and some of them were very comfortable, indeed. I... I liked primes. One... you knew where you were with a prime. A prime was always prime. One couldn’t imagine a prime being not prime, and at a time of uncertainty and capriciousness and broken promises and beatings, prime stood out. You could trust a prime.

Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) was born in England. Having obtained his medical degree at Oxford University, he moved to the USA. There he worked as a consultant neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital where in 1966, he encountered a group of survivors of the global sleepy sickness of 1916-1927. Sacks treated these patients with the then-experimental drug L-Dopa producing astounding results which he described in his book Awakenings. Further cases of neurological disorders were described by Sacks with exceptional sympathy in another major book entitled The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat which became an instant best seller on its publication in 1985. His other books drew on his rich experiences as a neurologist gleaned over almost five decades of professional practice. Sacks's work was recognized by prestigious institutions which awarded him numerous honours and prizes. These included the Lewis Thomas Prize given by Rockefeller University, which recognizes the scientist as poet. He was an honorary fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and held honorary degrees from many universities, including Oxford, the Karolinska Institute, Georgetown, Bard, Gallaudet, Tufts, and the Catholic University of Peru.

Title: You could always trust a prime

Listeners: Kate Edgar

Kate Edgar, previously Managing Editor at the Summit Books division of Simon and Schuster, began working with Oliver Sacks in 1983. She has served as editor and researcher on all of his books, and has been closely involved with various films and adaptations based on his work. As friend, assistant, and collaborator, she has accompanied Dr Sacks on many adventures around the world, clinical and otherwise.

Tags: boarding school, prime numbers, mental arithmetic, puzzles

Duration: 1 minute, 1 second

Date story recorded: 19-23 September, 2011

Date story went live: 02 October 2012