1, 2, 3, 4 ... oh no, I missed again.
Let me try again,
1, 2, 3, 5 … yes dhana, we are getting it.
7, 10 … oh, what? There it slips again.
This was me, nervously trying to count prime numbers during a Hackathon to calm myself down, so I could fix a JavaScript issue that had been breaking our app. My friend and I had already been at it for more than 6 hours in a 7 hour long hackathon.
While I was forgetting the most basic syntaxes on javascript and stressing myself out, meanwhile, my friend was working (wrestling) with the Java so that we can show something as a demo instead of expressing our stressed thoughts.
So why do i count primes in that situation?
For me, counting primes is a calm down ritual which i picked it up from watching Foundation Series in Apple TV, in which a character called Gaal Dornick, a Math Prodigy who counts primes to stay calm during uncertain and stressful moments. Whenever she is stressed or confused, she go on counting primes, not like 1,2,3 and all, she used to start from some 6 digit primes, maybe even 8 digits. (Chitti from endhiran would feel her as a worthy opponent on that case)
And here I was, stumbling after 7.
After years of schooling in math and an engineering graduate, my "prime ritual" barely made it past single digit.
Still, I liked the idea of counting primes whenever I felt anxious or trapped in spirals of thought.
Sometimes I would start from 1, sometimes from some random two digit number in the middle to anchor my mind in the present moment.
But,
Over the time, during that hackathon also, I realized that counting primes actually added more anxiety to the anxiety I already had. And while I was spiraling over primes, my friend was spiraling over Java APIs. Truly, we were just two clueless beginners discovering how to code in the hackathon.
At the end of our hackathon, we found 2 things. The one is we messed up the hackathon with our poor coding skills and we need to learn a lot and then Counting primes was less of a stress buster and more of a stress multiplier.
After practicing (and failing) for a few months, I quit the ritual in the very same year I started it, which is 2023.
Recently in 2025, when I met that same hackathon friend, we laughed about how clueless we both were back then. And for a brief second, I counted primes again and failed again and this time i failed in the double digit prime 😅 💜 ✨
Founding Issac Assimov through Foundation
While Watching the Foundation Series, I was intrigued by Isaac Asimov because of some goose-bump moments in the series and then i used to watch the related videos about him and read a few short stories of him. Let me share a few here:
- Youtube Interview: Isaac Asimov: If god Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted? (1 mins)
- The Short Story: The Last Question (~15 pages)
- Series: The Foundation (Apple TV)
Start with 2–3 episodes, and if you like it, continue. It introduces a whole new universe and fresh ideas, so it's definitely worth trying.