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Is there a practical reason this is useful information? Increasingly large prime numbers will be found, so why is this valuable outside bottling up factorizatio
by jack9 9y ago
Is there a practical reason this is useful information? Increasingly large prime numbers will be found, so why is this valuable outside bottling up factorization work...for theoretical future division problems? Google has not been helpful.
- JshWright 9y agoI think this is a pretty classic "because it's there". It's pretty unlikely finding a single new prime will reveal anything interesting (though it's certainly not impossible that it would lead to the discovery of some previously unknown pattern or progression)
- colejohnson66 9y agoExactly. Primes of this size are found simply for the “because why not?” factor
- CreepGin 9y agoAny discovery is useful information. As for practicality, the methods used to find the number may be of more immediate value than the actual finding.
- jack9 9y ago> Any discovery is useful information. I don't think that's true in the slightest. I had an original thought, which is effectively a discovery of something new. The time to transcribe and validate currently outweighs the value of most novelties and that may still not produce anything useful enough to justify the storage of that information (effectively making it useless having never been used and now forgotten).
- xelxebar 9y agoThe large primes themselves don't have much use as far as I am aware, but the methods and tools developed to find them have apparently been quite helpful in other fields. This is much the same argument for why the LHC is a good idea. The people who care about Higgs bosons proper are quite few.