At 12:14 AM 10/23/02 -0700, you wrote:
I always get asked what is the purpose or use for such large prime numbers. Since I'm not a math geek, I don't know what to tell them.The stock answer is usually somewhat of a lie.
Huge prime numbers are useful in cryptography and and encryption, and helps to make data more secure. This is because one of the common encryption methods is to create a "key" using two very large prime numbers multiplied together. To read the encrypted message one would need both of the original prime numbers. Without the ability to factor that product into the original prime numbers, the message is unreadable.
The reason that this answe ris somewhat of a lie is that the prime numbers used in cryptography are usually NOT the "largest prime numbers in the world" at the time, nor too close to it. (It'd be easy to crack such keys if they were limited to the 1000 largest primes -- then you're down to a trial and error set of about a million combinations).
_________________________________________________________________________
Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm
Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
