SOAR Spring Course

All About Numbers

Factoring Is
Easy? Try 7,182,391 or
10,620,951,283

Much of modern cryptography is based on the difficulty of problems from number theory, such as factoring the product of two large prime numbers. The two numbers to the left each have only two factors. Can you find them?

An integer p>1 is prime if it is evenly divisible only by 1 and itself. Are there infinitely many primes? How are they distributed among the natural numbers? (The graph above is a hint -- click here for an explanation.)

Are Mersenne numbers M_p (where p is prime) and Fermat numbers F_n (n=0, 1, 2,...) always prime?
Find out: enrol in the SOAR spring 2003 course!
See the SOAR spring 2003 course web page

F_n=2^2ⁿ+1
M_p=2^p-1