為數字申請專利

底下這一段Notices讀者來函相當有趣，

說明有人申請到某個數字的專利！你相信嗎？

Software Patents
When asked about software patents,
Donald Knuth [Notices, March 2002]
conjectured that it might be possible
to patent a 300-digit integer. The readers
might be interested to know that
I have already patented a 309-digit
integer as claim 37 of U.S. Patent
5,373,560, issued in 1994. It relates to
cryptography, and it is not as interesting
as what Knuth had in mind. At
the time, some people thought that
patenting a number was a new extreme
in silly software patents, but
now we have business method patents
that are even sillier.

—Roger Schlafly