When the e-mail is the option of choose to promote your research.

 

7. Test for Primes Menaces Internet

 

(Excerpt from Story # 7, in “100 Top Science Stories of 2002”)

 

“The e-mail that three Indian computer scientists sent to a few dozen of the world’s best mathematicians on August 4 was shockingly simple and elegant. Their algorithm, a scant 13 lines long, provided a test for whether a number is “Prime”...  when mathematicians around the world opened their e-mail the next morning and looked at the work of Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal, and Nitin Saxena of the Indina Institute of Technology in Kanpur, the world changed… The algorithm points toward an efficient solution to an old problem but suggests a new one as well. Encryption protocols used over the Internet rely on the difficulty of factoring into primes. Once that becomes easy, those protocols may be rendered useless. Despite this potential turmoil, mathematics is a field in which simplicity and beauty are standards of excellence, and this proof passes those tests.”

-         David Appell

 

Source: Discover (Special Issue: The Year in Science), January 2003, 24(1): 61.

© Copyright 2003 The Walt Disney Company.

 

See it on line at: http://www.discover.com/jan_03/math.html

 

In the same number, in page 8 there is a math comment:

Numbers, Please (http://www.discover.com/jan_03/letters.html)
I write to express my pleasure with the roundtable discussion ["Does Math Matter Anymore?" October]. I am an amateur logician, having had a lifelong fascination with foundations, logic, and set theory. The math situation in New Zealand, where I live, is not a happy one. The curriculum is a shambles; students enter university having never heard of set union and intersection. Math is no longer about quantity but rather order and pattern in human experience. However, young people have no inkling of this fact before entering university. Should children learn long division? Probably, but they should not spend more than, say, 10 weeks on it. What do the young need to learn? Less calculus and more linear algebra. More exponential function and natural logarithms and less trigonometry. Math as careful definitions and shrewd axioms instead of elaborate proofs.

Philip Meguire
University of Canterbury
Christchurch, New Zealand

 

The full “Roundtable Discussion” can be seen at: http://www.discover.com/oct_02/featroundtable.html

Other notes:

PRIMES is in P

“One of the main features of this result is that the proof is neither too complex nor too long (their preprint paper is only 9 pages long!), and relies on very innovative and insightful use of results from number theory.”

 

Other Internet sites:

“Three math wizards have found a way to identify extremely large prime numbers. Unfortunately, their work may make hacking encryption protocols on the Internet much too easy” (page 3, Discover, Jan., 2003)

 

To download their full old version of paper in PDF: http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/news/primality.pdf

 

To download their full new, revised version (PDF): http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/news/primality_v3.pdf

 

To see some FAQs: http://crypto.cs.mcgill.ca/~stiglic/PRIMES_P_FAQ.html

 

The news reports in Indian Magazines: http://www.flonnet.com/fl1917/19171290.htm, http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/aug/10prime.htm

 

The news report in other countries Magazines: http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s647647.htm , http://news.com.com/2100-1001-949170.html, http://www.newstribune.com/stories/081002/wor_0810020057.asp

 

(Note: In their Web page, the Indian discoverers have a very ugly link under the title of “Assorted Related Links” in which they manifest their political views as “warriors against the war on Iraq”, so they are using their “stage” as some of the U.S. movie celebrities do)

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