Re:A Curious Sequence of Prime Numbers
by ummonk on Sunday May 26, 2019 @07:11PM
(#20018162)
Wait, you expect to be able to easily check primality of 2^32 + 1 by hand? Like with a naive algorithm you’d need to use erastothenes sieve to find primes up to 2^16 to test against. Granted, 641 itself is rather small but if you didn’t expect to encounter a factor that early...
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> Like with a naive algorithm you’d need to use erastothenes sieve to find primes up to 2^16 to test against.
π(2^16)=6542: if you told me in elementary school that I might disproving something famous I can see myself working on that for a couple of hours daily for a week or so.
What if I told you you'd very probably just show that the pattern continues to hold for the first 5 n?
You’d stifle mathematical innovation: after all, there are quite a few things that have been proved or discovered by people who were fortunate enough to not be told that they were solving a hard problem.