Prime numbers in linen
Customers often say to me: ‘What a beautiful pattern’, or ‘nice squares’. ‘Nice as a napkin’, or ‘it would make a great tea towel’ is what I hear. ‘Well, I’m going to hang it on my wall’, said the mathematician. Because all those seemingly random squares represent the prime numbers. Prime numbers? Oh yes, numbers that are only divisible by one and by themselves. So how do I work out where the number 13 should be, or 313? After some puzzling, whizz-kids, nerds and number freaks will find the answer, especially if they have heard of the mathematician Gauss. For you and me, luckily, there is a simpler explanation.
No longer available
The cloths with the Prime Numbers are unfortunately no longer available, because they can only be woven in large quantities. We are sorry about that.
The prime numbers cloths are woven in pure linen (warp) with pure cotton (weft). They have a really handy size: 65 x 65 cm. Multifunctional, you can use them as a napkin, a small table cloth, a hand towel or a tea towel. Framed on the wall? Gorgeous. For example, we have even made covers from the cloth (with an underlay on the inside) for our laptop, iPad and iPhone. What a marvellous idea!
A tea towel with a history
Balthasar van der Pol, a famous Dutch mathematician and physicist, created this pattern on a sheet of paper in 1945. He showed it to the director of the linen manufacturer E.J.F. van Dissel in Eindhoven, who liked it so much that he decided to weave tea towels with it. Van Dissel sold the tea towel all over the world, until the weaving mill closed its gates in 1972. Even Einstein had one. Sanny paid 900 Dutch guilders (approx. €450) at an auction for her first Prime Numbers tea towel in 1996 (don’t worry, you only need to pay €27.50). The other bidder also knew that this was a very special tea towel. Sanny took the Prime Numbers tea towel into production again in 2004, after having spent a few evenings counting all the squares and copying them onto graph paper.