Record 232-digit number from cryptography challenge factored
January 8th, 2010 |
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A team of researchers has successfully factored a 232-digit number into its two composite prime-number factors, but too late to claim a $50,000 prize once attached to the achievement. The number, RSA-768, was part of a cryptography challenge that technically ended in 2007 that had been sponsored by RSA Laboratories, a prominent computer-security firm. RSA-768, [...]
Keep reading »Goldbach Variations
May 15th, 2013 |
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On Monday, Harald Helfgott of the École Normale Supériure in Paris posted a proof of one of the oldest open problems in number theory to the preprint repository arxiv. The ternary Goldbach conjecture, like so many questions in number theory, is easy to state but hard to prove. Every odd number greater than 5 can [...]
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91 Is April Fooling You
April 1st, 2013 |
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Rather appropriately, April 1st is the 91st day of the year, at least in non-leap years such as 2013. 91 might look innocent, but it’s a sneaky little number because 91=7×13. That might not seem sneaky to you, but I’m here to tell you why it is. Every whole number can be broken down into [...]
Keep reading »Where in the World Are the Odd Perfect Numbers?
January 10th, 2013 |
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The launch of Roots of Unity was just in time for this year’s Joint Mathematics Meetings, a mathapalooza put on by the two largest professional mathematical societies (the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America). Nearly 6,000 of my closest mathematical friends are here with me in sunny San Diego taking in the [...]
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