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Assignment 6 Adv. Thermo (002, 025)

1) The document discusses the history of prime numbers from ancient to modern times, including early attempts to list primes and check for primality as well as more recent developments in prime number theory and efficient generation of primes. 2) It describes important contributions like Eratosthenes' sieve, Fermat's little theorem, Riemann's zeta function, and how they helped solve problems like finding primes between numbers, checking primality, and understanding prime distribution. 3) Applications of prime numbers in cryptography are discussed, like Diffie-Hellman key exchange and use of large primes in RSA encryption. The document concludes by noting some unsolved problems in prime numbers.

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87 views3 pages

Assignment 6 Adv. Thermo (002, 025)

1) The document discusses the history of prime numbers from ancient to modern times, including early attempts to list primes and check for primality as well as more recent developments in prime number theory and efficient generation of primes. 2) It describes important contributions like Eratosthenes' sieve, Fermat's little theorem, Riemann's zeta function, and how they helped solve problems like finding primes between numbers, checking primality, and understanding prime distribution. 3) Applications of prime numbers in cryptography are discussed, like Diffie-Hellman key exchange and use of large primes in RSA encryption. The document concludes by noting some unsolved problems in prime numbers.

Uploaded by

divya
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© © All Rights Reserved
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ASSIGNMENT-6 (ADV.

THERMODYNAMICS)
BY: DIVYA (1MS15CH025)

ABHIJEET (1MS15CH002)

In the video A Brief History Of Primes , Prof Manindra Agrawal talks about the history of primes and
how these magical numbers became one of the major open problems of mathematics over the
years.

If we start listing out prime numbers at a very basic level i.e. 1 to 100, it is observed that the fraction
of primes decreases progressively. To procced with it and to go in depth about primes, we try
answering 4 questions and in that process know primes to their fullest.
Q.1 How many primes?
Q.2 How many less than n?
Q.3 How to know if a no. is prime?
Q.4 How to generate primes?
The earliest of the approach to listing out primes was in back 230 BC by Eratosthenes known as the
“Sieve of Eratosthenes”. It listed out all the primes between two numbers by the step by step
crossing multiples method. The only drawback was it was slow and there’s not always the need to
generate all nos. when we need only one number. Hence by this method Q.3 is partially solved. After
this development of primes showed no progress in the period 200 BC- 1600 AD. Then around 1665
AD Pierre de Fermat contributed majorly in the field of primes by his last theorem i.e. Fermat’s Little
Theorem.
an (mod n) = a
It can be used to check primality. If a no. n is prime then substitution in this form equals to a.

It was observed later that Carmichael numbers also satisfied this test (the smallest no. being 561).
Hence it was proved wrong and couldn’t be used to check primality. After this there was a big
problem to generate a formula that gives all the primes in the range by just substituting numbers in
it. The developments in this field were:

(1) Euler found after 100 years that

22^m – 1 is always prime, but it did not stand good for the number 5.

(2) Mersenne Primes

2m-1 where m is prime. This gives us the largest known prime no. today i.e. 213466917-1 (4 million
digits)

(3) Euler’s formula

m2+m+41
Around 1808 Gauss and Legendre gave a conjecture that the no. of primes less than ‘a’ converges to
n/ log n as n increases. Though it was a conjecture the validity of this wasn’t proved back then.
Riemann’s Zeta function (1859) proved as a ground breaking result in the identification of primes
numbers and their distribution. It stated that the zeroes in the “interesting” region of zeta function
lie in a straight line.

Later in 1896- Hadamard and Poussin positively proved Gauss’s conjuncture and it was answered
that the total number of primes less than n converges to n / log n.

Many formula for primes for primes were developed but none of them were accepted widely. In
1964, Willans gave the formula that n is prime iff:

(n-1)!+1, this formula provide no new insight as it was known that that a prime no. has only one
factor which is the no. itself.

With the advancement in computational mathematics then came a need of a quicker method to
generate primes and check for primality. In 1930s it was shown that a fast method should take
(log n)c steps for some constant c. Eratosthenes sieve took at least n steps and Willans method
included n-2 times multiplication.

(First Efficient method)

1972 Gary Miller: roughly (log n) 4 steps. Correctness was proved by assuming Reiman Hypothesis.

1974-76 Solvay and Strassen: small chance of going incorrect if n is composite

Applications of Primes

In 1976, am asymmetric cryptosystem was published by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. This
method of key exchange which uses exponentiation in a finite field came to be known as Diffie-
Hellman key exchange. This was the first published practical method for establishing a shared-key
over an authenticated communication channel without using a prior shared secret. They were called
Public Key Crypto systems using which two strangers can share secret information, even though they
are unaware of their respective methods of coding. Adding to which the third person listening to the
conversation will not be able to decode the information. This had a breakthrough in the history of
financial security and the application of prime numbers. 160 digits primes are used in RSA systems
for security purposes.

(1983: Almost efficient method)

Adelman, Pomerance and Rumeli gave the method that was proved to be unconditionally correct
and never made a mistake.

(log n)c logloglog n operations (theoretically reaches infinity)

THE MOST EFFICIENT METHOD WITHOUT DRAWBACKS (2002):

By Agrawal, Kayal and Saxena


 never makes a mistake
 unconditionally correct
 efficient

The still unanswered questions in mathematics are:

Reimann’s hypothesis, Goldbach’s conjecture (every even no. is a sum of two primes), there exists
infinitely twin primes (n, n+2) and conjecture on the distance between two primes (n: n+c (logn)3)

RSA system depends on factoring composite numbers efficiently and the system is so highly
dependent on these numbers that even one formula or idea to factorise these numbers can lead to
RSA systems becoming history.

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