Mater Ticket Numbers

Today I received my ticket numbers in the soon-to-be-drawn Mater Prize Home and naturally I scrutinised the fifteen numbers (8539837 to 8539851) that I had been assigned. It turns out that there is one prime number in that range: 8539847. It's too large to show up in the Online Encyclopaedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) but I discovered the following interesting features of the number:

• the first four digits 8539 form a prime number
• the digit sequence 39847 forms a prime number
• the digit sequence 539 factorises to 7^2×11
• the digit sequence 847 factorises to 7×11^2
• no digit is repeated except for 8 which occurs twice, suggestive of 88

Now 88 is an interesting number. Here is an extract from the Wikipedia entry:

Number 88 symbolises fortune and good luck in Chinese culture, since the word 8 sounds similar to the word Fā (发, which implies 发财, or wealth, in Mandarin or Cantonese). The number 8 is considered to be the luckiest number in Chinese culture, and prices in Chinese supermarkets often contain many 8s. The shape of the Chinese character for 8 (八) implies that a person will have a great, wide future as the character starts narrow and gets wider toward the bottom. The Chinese government has been auctioning auto license plates containing many 8s for tens of thousands of dollars. The 2008 Beijing Olympics opened on 8/8/08 at 8 p.m. In addition, 88 is also used to mean "bye bye (拜拜)" in Chinese-language chats, text messages, SMSs and IMs. 88 can be seen as shorthand for 8181, which when pronounced in standard Mandarin is identical to "bye bye".

Given that the prize draw is on June 30th, it can be assumed that my tickets (purchased yesterday) are amongst the final ones to be issued, so that each ticket has about a 8.5 million to 1 chance of winning. This is approximately the same chance of choosing the six winning numbers on Saturday night's Lotto.