Re:All Mersenne prime exponents below 100m tested at least once
by schoen on Friday December 04, 2020 @06:41PM
(#25309822)
While I wasn't at EFF at the time the donation was made, I find it totally credible that the donor was an individual who wanted to highlight the Internet's ability to let people work together in new ways, and didn't have any hidden motive for encouraging this particular work. I believe primality testing was suggested as a topic for the prize by a panel of scientific advisors, who were mostly mathematicians.
In that timeframe, the main technical advances that helped GIMPS get more efficient were being made by Richard E. Crandall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Crandall), who also wrote Prime Numbers: A Computational Perspective with Carl Pomerance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Pomerance). If these folks are trying to help governments keep a monopoly on expertise about number theory and the difficulty of the RSA problem, they seem to be doing a pretty bad job of it.
In that timeframe, the main technical advances that helped GIMPS get more efficient were being made by Richard E. Crandall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Crandall), who also wrote Prime Numbers: A Computational Perspective with Carl Pomerance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Pomerance). If these folks are trying to help governments keep a monopoly on expertise about number theory and the difficulty of the RSA problem, they seem to be doing a pretty bad job of it.