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A comment on 42 is found to be the sum of three cubes. Parent comment

Re:42 is found to be the sum of three cubes by ipince on Friday September 06, 2019 @11:44AM (#20896665)
Well, yeah, pretty much.

In number theory you study properties/patterns of the numbers. This is an example of such a property.

These properties often seem like they don’t have any applications, and often they don’t, but not always. For example, cryptography is basically all based on number theory.

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Re:42 is found to be the sum of three cubes by seph-reed on Friday September 06, 2019 @12:02PM (#20896839)
I watched a great series once on generating ~prime numbers which explained how to use number theory to check a randomly generated number for a probability of being prime. By using a bunch of weird rules, you can be ~99% sure it's prime without having to do huge computations.
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