Protosarithmophobia

I am often intrigued by the lists of phobias that have presumably affected someone at some time. They are irrational fears as the fear is out of all proportion to the threat. Arachnophobia, the fear of spiders, is quite common. I do suffer mildly from Agoraphobia (which I find difficult to explain to non-sufferers)  but I have yet to find a word for my personal hang-up – jellyfish. I really can’t stand the things and I wouldn’t go anywhere near sea water in case they were hanging around (and I’m pretty sure they do most of the time). I’m actually a lot better over that now as it was the association with water that caused me problems. In a way, fear of jellyfish is not entirely irrational as some jellyfish can sting and some are even dangerous. I suppose the same could be said of spiders but the phobia element is when the fear is present without any genuine threat. However, one thing I do have is a completely irrational dislike of prime numbers.

There is no official name for a fear of prime numbers but I can’t abide the things and I can never fathom why mathematicians get so excited by them – they recently discovered the largest one so far so at least I know that 2^57,885,161 – 1 is a thing to be avoided. The thing is, I find them such awkward, useless blighters. How does one arrange cans neatly when there is a prime number of them? How does one share out a prime number of sweeties? I can cope with the first few: 2, 3 and 5 are reasonable enough and I can put up with 7 on a good day. But how is one expected to cope with 11? Maybe this is why football managers are constantly tinkering with their formations? Triskaidekaphobia is the fear of 13 but can you honestly say that 17, 19 or 23 are any better? 29 is just completely useless. My primary school headmaster used to use this as an example: “Can anyone tell me a number that one can divide 29 by?” That really used to bother me.

The completely irritating thing is that I occasionally find a use for prime numbers professionally. Just this Friday I needed to arrange automated jobs on a computer system to run regularly such that they didn’t overload the server and I was reminded about reading about the breeding cycles of Cicada – a type of insect that breeds in cycles of 13 or 17 years depending on their sub-species, thus avoiding each other. I just scheduled my jobs to run every 2,3,5,7,11 minutes (and so on). It works – but it also looks awful on the scheduler.

So how about a name for this irrational distaste for the prime? How about Protosarithmophobia?