Comprehension test
For those who can follow the sign, possibilities await
CAMBRIDGE -- You can't miss the three new 50-foot-wide beige banners hanging from the ceiling of the Harvard Square subway station. But you may need a Massachusetts Institute of Technology degree to have the foggiest idea what they mean.
''[First 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e].com," is all the banners say.
It may take a few seconds for commuters to realize there's a math question being asked here. But T riders passing through this stop in the shadow of Harvard University may be more likely than average Bostonians to recognize ''e" as an important irrational number -- kind of a distant cousin of pi -- widely used in calculus and other higher mathematics.
Rosemarie Yevich, an atmospheric chemistry researcher at Harvard who passed under the banners on her way to work yesterday afternoon, was intrigued and planned to ask her daughter, Helen, a Harvard sophomore studying applied mathematics, what the expression meant.
''Either that, or I thought I'd check where I could find the answer. I thought I'd Google it," Yevich said.
Instead, Yevich was delighted to learn from a reporter that Google itself is behind the ad. And because an earlier version began appearing on a billboard next to Highway 101 in California's Silicon Valley in July, now you can use Google -- as well as search engines like MSN.com, Yahoo.com, and Lycos.com -- to search a variety of weblogs and Internet sites where the math challenge in the oddball ad campaign is discussed.
However, anyone who solves the puzzle (by combining the first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e with ''.com" and entering it into a Web browser) discovers that the website named for the solution, www.7427466391.com, only gives you directions to another website with another vexing math problem. Solve that, and you get to an internal Google page that praises ''your big, magnificent brain" and invites you to apply for a job.
As long ago as the heyday of Wang Laboratories and
''This Google ad works on a micro level, and it works on a macro level," said Fritz Kuhn, a senior vice president of Boston advertising firm Hill, Holliday. ''The target-audience people who are going to see it are going to say, 'That is my language, that is directed at me.' For the rest of us, it just burnishes the image of Google: I can't work there, but, wow, those guys are smart."
Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., isn't talking about the ads. But MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said the banners went up late last week and will hang for a month.
Google, which recently had a high-profile IPO, has long prided itself on its deep talent base of engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists who fashion complex algorithms for searching Web pages.
''The limit to our growth is our ability to get the best talent on the planet and get them working on the toughest computing problems around," Google engineering vice president Wayne Rosing said in a Reuters interview earlier this year.
E -- formally known as the base of the natural logarithm -- begins 2.718281828 and goes on forever.
An indication of how much Google brainiacs love e: When they filed for their initial public stock offering, they put down as $2,718,281,828 the amount they hoped to raise.
The dull, mathematically dense banners seemed to attract few eyeballs yesterday.
''It's a good idea, but I think they're going to miss an awful lot of people who don't even want to look at it," said Clare Putnam, 41, of Somerville, student program coordinator at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Ed Arnold, 31, of Watertown, a drummer with the band Amun Ka, had no idea what the banner meant until a reporter explained it. But then Arnold said: ''Advertising is all about targeting who you want to get. If they're trying to get very intelligent mathematicians, that's the way to go."
Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com.
