We have a Schiller problem, surmised a group of students working pseudonymously as Mr. E. In response to a decade’s worth of “measly showings” by Carleton’s legendary plaster bust, “predictable run-throughs at Rotblatt,” and a few “[Late Night] Breakfast-fueled brawls,” they organized the Search4Schiller contest, offering chaotic clues, codes, and challenges every week of winter term on Instagram.
Teams racking up points in a range of activities, from campus-wide scavenger hunts to dance-offs, were rewarded handsomely with prizes. But only the top two teams, F*** I Love Gambling House and Schiller Schnoops, received the ultimate prize, delivered at sunrise on March 13: Schiller’s location. Now that Schiller has resurfaced, Mr. E promises he’ll make an unscheduled appearance on campus soon.
Search4Schiller’s first challenge was a bingo game with a 12-hour time limit. Each card was filled with a range of tasks: carve a fruit or vegetable into Schiller, befriend a first year, submit a photo of 27.5 newly made snow angels (“I will count”), make a 10-person human pyramid in Sayles, find the weirdest book in the Libe, etc.
Accepting a “moon shot” challenge, the team Rimes With Purple—Ivy Edwards ’28, Devin Gulliver ’28, Asa Grumdahl ’28, and William Marinovic ’28—discovered a new prime number. Verified by T5K and PrimeGrid, the number (3215 × 2^2182461) + 1 is the 4,891st largest prime ever discovered. It’s the first in a new category of prime numbers the team coined in honor of the Carleton figure-head, “Schiller Primes.” See all 656,990 digits of it at schillerprimes.surge.sh.
Noted Schiller fan Jonathan Capehart ’89 joined in the fun on his MSNBC Sunday Show, where he announced the winners of the Search4Schiller competition to the nation and revealed the bust’s hiding place: it spent the winter encased in watertight plastic beneath the icy waters of Lower Lyman Lake.
