In case you wanted to know, that's how many distinct and efficient potion recipes are possible in Skyrim. 2144 of them are 2 ingredient potion recipes; the rest use 3 ingredients.

"Distinct" means the order of ingredients is ignored.
"Efficient" means each ingredient is contributing at least 1 effect that the potion would not otherwise have (no wasted ingredients).

I now have a list of all 44172 such potions that describes the ingredients and effects. Well, technically its more of a mySQL database...

This is the Lost and Found Department. We have recently found a "life" and we have reason to believe it is yours. Please verify if yours is in fact missing. If so, please contact the LFD as soon as possible!

All kidding aside, you need to eat once in awhile. That can't be healthy.

did you find all of these yourself??

lulz

@OP, you should get to the uesp now

Using some php code, yes. But I sure as HELL haven't tried making them all in game, or figuring them out by hand. I just had the computer process the ingredient / effect info I found on the web (UESP wiki).
I write web apps for a living and decided to take on a full-featured "Skyrim Alchemy Workbench" as a learning project; creating the database was one of the steps needed to get the performance / features I wanted, and actually the harder part of the process.
Though I'm having some trouble; my initial run through told me the number I initially posted, but the DB only has 21974 recipes. I did do some extra checks for repeats before writing to the DB, so the lower number is actually correct. To bad you can't edit thread titles.

Then why does it seem like I only ever use three?

Also that is cool.

If anybody want to try some 5 effect recipes, here's all of the ones I found.