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Re:A Curious Sequence of Prime Numbers by userbinator on Sunday May 26, 2019 @07:17PM (#20018202)
2^(2^5) + 1 is 4296967297 = 641 * 6700417. Not at all a huge number today, but in those days it'd probably be considered "astronomical".

Also, the series 2^(2^n)+1 grows extremely quickly; the next number is 18446744073709551617 = 274177 * 6728042131072, and after that 340282366920938463463374607431768211457 = 59649589127497217 * 5704689200685129054721.

Re:A Curious Sequence of Prime Numbers by saagarjha on Sunday May 26, 2019 @07:24PM (#20018246)
2^32+1 is likely reaching the limits of what an elementary school child is able to do by hand. As for the larger numbers: they do get unwieldy quickly, but I think it might be possible to manually find the factors of them with probabilistic primality testing.
Re:A Curious Sequence of Prime Numbers by lifthrasiir on Sunday May 26, 2019 @10:46PM (#20019059)
Well, the child will be bored much earlier :-)

For Fermat numbers 2^(2^n) + 1, it is well known that every prime factor should have the form k 2^(n+2) + 1. The sequence (A007117) thus goes like: k = 5 for n = 5 (Euler in 1732, very managable), k = 1071 for n = 6 (Thomas Clausen in 1854) and k = 116503103764643 for n = 7 (only known in 1970 after the modern computer).

Re:A Curious Sequence of Prime Numbers by hoseja on Monday May 27, 2019 @04:51AM (#20020500)
Just a typo but 2^(2^5) + 1 is 42946967297, you skipped the fourth digit.