| Index | Recent Threads | Unanswered Threads | Who's Active | Guidelines | Search |
 |
World Community Grid Forums
Category: Community
Forum: Chat Room
Thread: what's the big deal about prime numbers? |
| No member browsing this thread |
|
Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 10
|
|
| Author |
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
news is full of another prime number found by distributed computing, but does not explain if it means anything to the rest of us. they actually described it as a 'fun social project'.
---------------------------------------- and for some reason there is a cash prize. [Edit 1 times, last edit by Former Member at Sep 27, 2008 9:18:43 PM] |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Prime numbers are part of Number Theory, a branch of mathematics that - usually - has no practical application but is full of interesting problems with solutions that vary from easy to remarkably difficult. Greek and Roman mathematics devoted a great deal of effort to Number Theory (Diophantine Equations, etc.) but almost all that work is lost. It was too abstruse to bother saving it after the fall of the Roman empire.
Computers are not very useful in developing mathematical theorems so far, but they can be used to find specific numbers with properties described in Number Theory, so that is what some mathematicians use them for. Lawrence |
||
|
|
Sgt.Joe
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Jul 4, 2006 Post Count: 7851 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
Prime numbers also have applications in cryptography.
----------------------------------------Cheers
Sgt. Joe
*Minnesota Crunchers* |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Prime numbers are part of Number Theory, a branch of mathematics that - usually - has no practical application but is full of interesting problems with solutions that vary from easy to remarkably difficult. Greek and Roman mathematics devoted a great deal of effort to Number Theory (Diophantine Equations, etc.) but almost all that work is lost. It was too abstruse to bother saving it after the fall of the Roman empire. Computers are not very useful in developing mathematical theorems so far, but they can be used to find specific numbers with properties described in Number Theory, so that is what some mathematicians use them for. Lawrence No Practical application ? How about encryption, I'm sure you guys have heard of this for security codes. http://www.cpaadvisor.us/sub/8_encryption.htm Wayne |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Some cryptographers use teensy tiny prime numbers with only a few hundred digits. Back in the 90's the NSA suggested replacing the 70's DES standard used by government departments with a different (classified) algorithm which the NSA considered a thousand times more difficult to break than the RSA algorithm, which is based on prime numbers. Deafening uproar by paranoids. Since then, a university professor has decrypted a challenge cipher message encrypted using the RSA algorithm. It was just some mathematical entertainment for him and his students.
In The Codebreakers by David Kahn, he emphasized that throughout history the difficulty of breaking a cipher system should be rated by cryptanalysts, since the proud cryptographers who create these systems always overestimate their security. Lawrence |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Some cryptographers use teensy tiny prime numbers with only a few hundred digits. Back in the 90's the NSA suggested replacing the 70's DES standard used by government departments with a different (classified) algorithm which the NSA considered a thousand times more difficult to break than the RSA algorithm, which is based on prime numbers. Deafening uproar by paranoids. Since then, a university professor has decrypted a challenge cipher message encrypted using the RSA algorithm. It was just some mathematical entertainment for him and his students. In The Codebreakers by David Kahn, he emphasized that throughout history the difficulty of breaking a cipher system should be rated by cryptanalysts, since the proud cryptographers who create these systems always overestimate their security. Lawrence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27_principle |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
so thats the end of safe encryption
sorta goes with the idea theres no sutch thing as a safe website unless you hire someone to do the security 24/7 so with that cushy job becoming availabe here come the new web guidelines demt http://www.twra5t.co.uk a sneak preview in the pipelines |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hello zentient,
so thats the end of safe encryption Not at all. The RSA algorithm is still considered a high security cipher system, based on the known difficulty of factoring large numbers into primes. It is just that any cipher that is not based on a one-time pad is breakable, at least in theory. The NSA claimed to have found a math problem that was even more difficult to solve (about a thousand times more difficult, the NSA claimed). They were willing to release an implementation of this algorithm that included a password-protected trapdoor. Each registered copy of the system would have a unique trap door password stored where a court order could get it. The offer didn't fly for various reasons, but what seemed peculiar to me was the vocal disbelief that mathematicians could factor large numbers or that any other algorithm could be more difficult than the RSA algorithm. Needless to say, the NSA did not reveal the mathematical problem that they were basing the cipher on. That would only result in a sudden burst of publicly available cipher systems that would take the NSA a thousand times as long to crack as the current RSA systems, which already make life difficult enough for the NSA. The NSA plays offense as well as defense. They want to be able to break ciphers as well as create secure ciphers. Lawrence |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Indeed. Public key cryptography was developed by a British mathematician years before Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman came up with RSA. But Clifford Cocks was working for GCHQ, and his discovery wasn't made public until 1997.
The security services are so.... secretive. |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
there also weired
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7661311.stm as if encryption had anything to do with a safe phone line |
||
|
|
|