for those unfamiliar with these Zen pattern numbers of the third realm or region, floating beyond the large GIMPS Mersenne prime numbers, I thought I'd mention some of my inspiration and influences; or ideas that seem vaguely relevant
it's easy to find weblinks for these people and websites
an interesting visualisation of one billion is available
Visualisation of powers of ten from one to 1 billion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000000000_(number)
Robert Munafo
classes of natural numbers aka counting numbers, positive integers
Reuben Goodstein
names for hyperoperations, Goodstein's theorem
John Horton Conway
Conway chained arrow recurrence relation, the fourth realm,
and heaps of wide ranging math ideas
Donald E Knuth
simple but good notation for hyperoperations
concrete math and art of computer programming books
Ronald Graham
Graham's number
Wolfram Research
cellular automata, NKS, Demonstrations project and Wolframalpha
Piet Hein
superegg
M C Escher
amazing patterns and art
Edward R Tufte
visual display of quantitative information
Andrzej Grzegorczyk
another perspective on the third realm or region
the Fast Growing Hierarchy and Grzegorczyk Hierarchy
Georges Perec
whose contributions to Oulipo were inspiring
I had to follow the ideas from Oulipo
to think creatively enough about the natural numbers, when in math mode, I was usually trying to think creatively about basic things
Patrick Gunkel
whose contributions to innovative thinking were inspiring
other inspirational people
Benoit Mandelbrot
Mandelbrot set (1979)
David Madore
tree pictures of transfinite ordinals, interesting visualisations but complicated to understand
Jonathan Bowers
polyhedra, polychora
and fourth realm ingenuity ( Bowers arrays )
gmalivuk, deedlit, wardaft and heaps of others .........
xkcd forum, My number is bigger game
iteror
another approach to the name big numbers game
I used to be interested in reading papers on these websites
Calresco and CCSR and Principia Cybernetica
complexity studies, artificial life ...
Tim Berners Lee
the worldwide web is 25 years old or young
Quickfur on Eretrandre
who sort of seemed to be thinking along a similar path to me
and of course the wonderful Eretrandre people
Henryk Trappman, Gottfried Helms, Dmitrii Kouznetsov, and others
who invented or discovered the beautiful tetration fractal pictures
and the many deep mathematics ideas on Eretrandre
and of course many others I forget but who also influenced me
or others who I remember, but if I mentioned them all
there would still be others I missed but should have included