Mathematicians Come Closer to Solving Goldbach's Weak Conjecture

Re:Mathematicians Come Closer to Solving Goldbach's Weak Con... by mikeash on Saturday May 12, 2012 @10:20AM (#3963928)

Is there any practical application to this? I'm not one of those silly people who only cares about math if it can make a better lawnmower or whatever, but I'm just curious as to whether this could make certain algorithms easier or something, or if it's "just" a pure number theory result.

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Re:Mathematicians Come Closer to Solving Goldbach's Weak Con... by adeelk on Saturday May 12, 2012 @05:04PM (#3965106)

The conjecture has been verified already for large enough n that it can be applied without a real proof; a proof won’t give any new “real world” applications. Like with Fermat’s last theorem, the real interest in a proof is in the ideas that would be developed along the way. (For example, on the way to proving FLT Wiles established the modularity theorem for a class of elliptic curves, and his work was extended to a proof of the full modularity theorem in 2001.)

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Re:Mathematicians Come Closer to Solving Goldbach's Weak Con... by dhugiaskmak on Saturday May 12, 2012 @04:49PM (#3965057)

Tao mentions in the article that there may be applications in cryptography.

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