Re: Largest prime ever just discovered

From: Ioannis (morpheus_at_olympus.mons)
Date: 02/27/05 

Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 21:12:25 +0200

Jim Spriggs wrote:

> Gnomon wrote:
>
>>http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm
>
>
> What is it about primes, I wonder? I never see things like "Largest
> composite discovered."

Have you ever had any Cryptography course?. Part of the hype is that he
who knows a large prime can use a crypto-scheme to encode a message with
a suitable key and transmit it safely.

With some of these schemes, if the message gets intercepted, any hope of
breaking the cipher relies on breaking the key, so the larger the key
the more efficient the encryption.

Not knowing whether a given key is prime or composite can make a
difference between decrypting a cipher and just staring at it in dismay
for ever.

Of course that's only part of it. People are also just interested in
primes for purely mathematical reasons.

> To even things up a little I'll offer
>
> 976964263264^(982758659875^8723964087)
>
> Can I sell it? Can I patent it? 

-- 
I. N. Galidakis
http://users.forthnet.gr/ath/jgal/
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Eventually, _everything_ is understandable