Hi Paul...
and others whose names I will not mention, they know who they are. and they
should know better too.
Please don't be so quick to tell people to "FAQ Off" or an equivalent.
Any barriers to newbies joining in is a barrier to the exponential
growth of GIMPS.
Wholeheartedly agree here. Lucas Wiman made a wonderful job of the FAQ - but
not *every* question is in there... if it were, what would be the point of
having a mailing list anyway? Or is, as Paul says, the list meant to be a
forum for people to shoot down every well-meaning question just because
they're farther up the learning curve? Some of Paul's examples are
blatant...
- - - Long ago ;-) I made some investigations about the period of
inverse of
prime numbers (1/p) (Is this good English ?).
*** Why? The mathematics is simple and well understood and has been
known
for centuries. Did you check the literature first, before wasting your
time??
So this is a "waste of time" is it? Is this poster trying to say that
getting interested in number theory is a waste of time? Furthermore, if
this poster had such a grasp of this "simple and well-understood" fact,
he'd realize there was no need to be rude about it. This might be
"elementary", but who's to say there's something in it that has been
overlooked for centuries? And despite its supposedly elementary nature,
"cycle lengths" of sequences are the basis of EVERY classical primality
test.
I would hate to be so arrogant to believe I knew everything about a subject.
I'd much rather have one well-meaning newbie poster than a dozen
self-opinionated ones. This sort of interest serves the most precious
purpose of all, it gets new people into the subject? Who cares if it's been
done before, or known for centuries? It might be something new to the
poster... it might just be their entrance into this beautiful subject.
My 8-year old is fascinated that she can multiply by 9, add the digits up,
and get back to 9 again. Perhaps I should take the above villain's advice,
tell her she is wasting her time, and ignore her completely. I think not.
What is it that causes people NOT to do even elementary reading first?
Perhaps the clue is in the poster's question? That he is worried about his
English? These "elementary" questions on this list fall into three
categories:
(1) there are a number of results that are already known, or easily
deducible from known theorems;
(2) there are results which, so far as I know, are new and interesting, but
interesting rather from their curiosity and apparent difficulty than their
importance;
(3) there are results which appear to be new and important...
As Lucas Wiman recently said to me (off-list, and I hope he doesn't mind me
quoting it), what if Hardy had instead said, "This Indian fellow is not
worth my time?".
I found an empiric relation between the number of digits of the period
(d) et the fact that p is prime, namely that d is a divisor of p-1. I
have been told that this was proved by Gauss.
*** As, I said, try reading a book on elementary number theory. Look
up "Lagrange's Theorem".
OK, off scurries our interested neophyte. He finds "Lagrange's theorem" and
is somewhat perturbed. How on earth does it help him that the order of a
subgroup divides the order of a group? Congratulations, all-knowing poster,
for deterring our interested number theorist...
Have people gotten too lazy to use
a library?
Have people *become* too lazy to give a civil answer to the interested
poster? If you don't wish to answer, then don't bother. If you do but feel
it's off-topic, do so off-list. Let's wonder too whether the poster was too
lazy to think of a grammatically-correct equivalent of *gotten* as well, no,
I'm not being a pointy hair, this was after all an answer to someone for
whom American English is not their primary language.
No. I like libraries.
Within arms reach I have multiple sessions to one of the fastest internet
links in the world.
Conversely I do not know of an accessible English Language good Maths
library near Nuremberg.
I love this concept, books are great. The web is great. The fact that
someone who knows the answer will see your question is wonderful. Perhaps
people need to think what this list is about. Perhaps people need to
re-analyse their reasons for being on it. If they're on it to discourage the
interested, then they're better off somewhere else.
Is this could be of any use in the search for large primes ?
Valid question.
The answer is probably "No", but it is a valid question.
The answer is definitely "yes", since all classical primality tests are
equivalent to finding the cycle length of an expansion in some base.
ps. How about one of the more knowledgeable Mathematicians (or Computer
Scientists) regularly communicating a little tutorial on an interesting
subject
of their choosing?
It would be a great idea, provided of course the know-it alls could stand
it. Yes, I'm backing Paul up here. I'm annoyed
