What is the 10,000th prime number

Joel Cyprus, PhD from Rice, taught courses in Electrical Engineering while holding down a full tome Job at Texas Instruments. He had a unique and very interesting way of grading. Let me try to recreate the spech he gace us on the opening day of class.

Over the course of this semester I am going make available to you about 110 points. These will be distributed among homework, pop quizzes, hour exams and outside projects. For a given exam, for example, you might be allowed to gain 20 points. If your score on the exam is an 80, you get 10 points. Homework not turned in gets you a goose egg. At end of the semester we sum ‘em up and you get an A for 90 or better, Bfor 80 to 89 and so on, So, you see, you have complete control of your grade.

He was bright, witty, engagingm generous and a great teacher. I took his courses in two different years.

In my senior year course he gave us the challenge of wrting a computer program to find the 10,000th prime number. And we got 5 points for each different computer we used to do the calculation. I am not going to go into the details of the algorithms I used, but I ran my FORTRAN program on the IBM 1620 and it took about 5 minutes. on the IBM 7040/7094 it took a few seconds, And on an Olivetti Underwood Programma 101, a desktop programmable calculator, it took an entire weekend.

15 points!