What is the practical utility of finding primes? Well, if the effort that we put into the topic today for its own sake is any indication, there is definitely at least something to it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is offering $550,000 worth of prizes to the first groups to discover a prime number more than 1 million, 10 million, 100 million and 1 billion digits long. The first two awards have already been claimed. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search has been looking for large prime numbers since 1996, and mathematicians in universities around the world are involved. The University of Tennessee at Martin provides a list of reasons why looking for primes is useful; aside from “for the glory!”, searching for primes leads to useful byproducts in other areas of number theory, provides an incentive for computational hardware development and leads to insights in the underlying workings of prime numbers themselves; the prime number theorem, for example, a theorem stating with high precision how often prime numbers are likely to occur at a given size, was first conjectured by looking at the distribution of actual prime numbers. Here, the hope is that if Primecoin takes off people will start looking for much more efficient ways of finding Cunningham and bi-twin chains, potentially leading to mathematical breakthroughs in how these chains work. Vitalik Buterin
Posted on: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 17:37:53 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015