MINISTER Quinn and his acolytes, clutching overheating calculators as they configured the cost to the exchequer of a fraction of a percentage point on next week's anticipated Budget concessions, may be interested in this one. Or perhaps not. But this little beauty is certain to start a stampede among number crunching mathematics professors for the nearest abacus, although somewhat more computing power will be required to verify the numerical hypothesis.

An amateur French maths specialist has reportedly claimed to have discovered the highest ever prime number, a figure, I'm nervously informed, to be divisible by itself and one. An engineer by profession, Mr Joel Armengaud spent nine months hunched over 18 interlinked PCs tweaking his theory that the number "two to the power of 1,398,269 minus one" is indivisible by anything but itself and one.

Announcing his super-calculating triumph to an excitable and expectant world this week, the irritatingly numerate Frenchman said that "there was only one chance in 35,000 that this number would actually turn out to be a prime number". Mr Armenguad's number is, apparently, prime - but avoid this man at parties. Dissenting voices would be advised not to contact the undersigned, an inveterate innumerate, but are welcome to buttonhole the French team at Landsdowne Road this afternoon.