4 ms·
Read this and wondered, what estimates are there on the density of the Mersenne primes as n grows? Google told me that, surprisingly, it's not even known that
by delhanty 8y ago
Read this and wondered, what estimates are there on the density of the Mersenne primes as n grows?
Google told me that, surprisingly, it's not even known that they are infinite!
I found this nice page on the Wagstaff Mersenne Conjecture:
https://primes.utm.edu/mersenne/heuristic.html https://primes.utm.edu/mersenne/heuristic.html
- ryacko 8y agoPossibly the only civilian use of quantum computing, an interesting decade is ahead.
- scythe 8y agoPrimality testing is actually much easier than integer factorization thanks to Fermat's "little" theorem. Methods based on this theorem, including the Lucas-Lehmer test for Mersenne primes, can identify prime numbers on classical computers in polynomial time. However, factorization is not possible with this method.
- chris_st 8y agoThat's okay, hardly anyone needs to factor prime numbers :-)