One of those properties is that while it is relatively easy to find larger prime numbers, it’s unavoidably hard to factor large numbers back into primes. It’s one thing to figure out that 20 ...

Ars has a rundown of the theoretical RSA process, and Wikipedia has a nice example of how RSA encryption works using relatively small prime numbers. But the significance of the keys' basis in ...

But then again, we didn't really have much use for prime numbers at all until relatively recently, and the Mersenne project points out that now they're the basis of cryptography algorithms.

We can now add 2 136,279,841-1 to the list, which at 41,024,320 decimal digits long is the biggest prime number currently known. It was discovered by a relatively new member of a group called the ...

Enthusiasts looking for larger and larger prime numbers ... But that’s nearly 100 million cases to check for a relatively puny eight-digit number. You would save significant work by realizing ...

While these begin relatively simply with the number 3 ... is just the 52nd known Mersenne prime number. Announced on Tuesday, GIMPS explained that M136279841 was first suspected on October ...

Prime numbers are only divisible by themselves ... so stayed aware of a relatively decent chance,” Durant tells New Scientist’s Matthew Sparkes. “I joined for a lot of reasons, in part ...

Prime numbers, of course ... The formula used to find these primes is 2n-1, which is relatively simple – just repeat until you find a number that can only be divided by one and itself.

Although it has been known for millennia that there are infinitely many prime numbers, there is no way ... called Carl Ludwig Siegel found a relatively simple formula that linked to this basket ...

This is relatively easy to show ... Ingham’s result into statements about how clumped or spread out prime numbers are as you move further along the number line, and about other patterns they ...

To that end, we looked around to find a good, relatively easy-to-understand ... In the case of RSA, the easy algorithm multiplies two prime numbers. If multiplication is the easy algorithm ...