Monday, 4. November 2002
Topic: - on November 4, 2002 at 8:20:01 PM CET
Math discovery rattles Net security
Will Manindra Agrawal bring about the end of the Internet as we know it? The question is not as ridiculous as it was just two months ago. Prof. Agrawal is a 36-year old theoretical computer scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India. In August, he solved a problem that had eluded millennia of mathematicians: developing a method to determine with complete certainty if a number is prime. PRIME NUMBERS ARE those divisible only by themselves and 1. While small primes like 5 or 17 are easy to spot, for very large numbers, those hundreds of digits long, there never had been a formula of “primality testing” that didn’t have a slight chance of error.
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