RE: Maths holy grail could bring disaster for internet
Mathematicians could be on the verge of solving two separate million dollar problems. If they are right - still a big if - and somebody really has cracked the so-called Riemann hypothesis, financial disaster might follow. Suddenly all cryptic codes could be breakable. No internet transaction would be safe. Looks like they are saying that if one can disprove the Riemann hypothesis, then one could break (presumably) public key crypto, (presumably) by factoring or computing DL. But I am not aware of any factoring or DL algorithm that can be drastically sped up if Riemann hypothesis is proven to be false? Here the author quotes the mathematician: The whole of e-commerce depends on prime numbers. I have described the primes as atoms: what mathematicians are missing is a kind of mathematical prime spectrometer. Chemists have a machine that, if you give it a molecule, will tell you the atoms that it is built from. Mathematicians haven't invented a mathematical version of this. That is what we are after. If the Riemann hypothesis is true, it won't produce a prime number spectrometer. But the proof should give us more understanding of how the primes work, and therefore the proof might be translated into something * that might produce this prime spectrometer. If it does, it will bring the * whole of e-commerce to its knees, overnight. So there are very big implications. This wording, with the word *might*, is more accurate, and not at all equivalent to the assertion the author makes at the beginning. Another bad article. --Anton - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Maths holy grail could bring disaster for internet
On Sep 6, 2004, at 21:52, R. A. Hettinga wrote: But the proof should give us more understanding of how the primes work, and therefore the proof might be translated into something that might produce this prime spectrometer. If it does, it will bring the whole of e-commerce to its knees, overnight. So there are very big implications. This would be a good thing. Because to rebuild the infrastructure based on symmetric crypto would bring the trusted third party (currently the CA) out of the shadows and into the light. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Maths holy grail could bring disaster for internet
On Mon, Sep 06, 2004 at 08:52:39PM -0600, R. A. Hettinga wrote: The whole of e-commerce depends on prime numbers. I have described the primes as atoms: what mathematicians are missing is a kind of mathematical prime spectrometer. Chemists have a machine that, if you give it a molecule, will tell you the atoms that it is built from. Mathematicians haven't invented a mathematical version of this. That is what we are after. If the Riemann hypothesis is true, it won't produce a prime number spectrometer. But the proof should give us more understanding of how the primes work, and therefore the proof might be translated into something that might produce this prime spectrometer. If it does, it will bring the whole of e-commerce to its knees, overnight. So there are very big implications. I bet the reporter had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find someone willing to make this claim. Nice for making a sensational article, but otherwise entirely worthless. Whether the proof is complete/correct or not, the gist of it seems to be a construction of a Hilbert-space of entire functions in whose context the zeta function, suitably transformed so that the critical line is mapped onto the reals, becomes a self-adjoint operator. To go from this to the reported claim is at least premature and likely ludicrous. -- /\ ASCII RIBBON NOTICE: If received in error, \ / CAMPAIGN Victor Duchovni please destroy and notify X AGAINST IT Security, sender. Sender does not waive / \ HTML MAILMorgan Stanley confidentiality or privilege, and use is prohibited. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
