Ever since Euclid proved that there is no largest prime number, mathematicians h

Question

Ever since Euclid proved that there is no largest prime number, mathematicians have spent a lot of time and energy searching for massive prime numbers. Awards are even given for this, but it’s not really about the money to them. They’ve received grants for doing this work, they take pride in doing so, and there seems to be some academic competition involved as well.

What is a prime number?

A prime number is only divisible by 1 and itself. The first few are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, and the list goes on infinitely. All primes can be written in the form 2n -1, where n is an integer, but not all numbers calculated with that formula are prime.

For example, for n = 3, 23 - 1 = 7, and 7 is prime. However, for n = 4, 24 - 1 = 15, and 15 is not prime. In January of 2013, one of the leaders in the field used a single powerful computer, along with thousands of PC's owned by people like you and me (the same people who donate their PC's computing power to search for SETI signals), and determined a world record prime number containing 17,425,170 digits. The actual number is calculated 257,885,161 - 1. Try putting that one in your calculator.

My questions for you are:

Why would they do this? Don't these brilliant mathematicians have better things to do, like solving world hunger?

What’s to gain from this endless search?

Explanation / Answer

Solution: - Thanks to you for thinking about world hunger. Actually the number theory is associated with cryptography. As you can see in your surrounding that All ATM are working on cryptography. If your pin is known, your bank details can be known or your bank account may be null by anybody. Prime numbers may be used to allot the PIN numbers.

In the war if you send encrypted message then you will win the war definitely. If your message is caught in between then it can be stopped or modified by the enemy and the result can be reversed.

As mathematicians are doing endless search to find the more prime numbers their enemies are trying to break their codes. In the market yesterday’s technology becomes fail today. Daily we are getting new software to open the encrypted message. Hence there is a race between the mathematicians to cipher or decipher messages.

So we can say that this endless search will be continued forever for the safety and integrity of human being which is also necessary to find the solution for hunger.      

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse E
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.