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Does anyone know of a useful application for this fact? Serious question.
by yitchelle 8y ago
Does anyone know of a useful application for this fact? Serious question.
- low_key 8y agoApparently not. It more or less says so in the article.
- Invictus0 8y agoPerhaps the algorithm used to discover the solution may be of application. As is often the case in pure math, the methods used to find solutions to otherwise inconsequential problems later find use years down the line.
- mjcohen 8y agoThe mathematician Edmund Landau said (translation from German): Number theory is useful, since one can graduate with it. (from his Foreword to Vorlesungen über Zahlentheorie (Lectures on Number Theory) (1927).) This from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Landau https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Landau
- kingaillas 8y agoNot right now... but maybe in the future, who knows. There was a time number theory was viewed as pointless: "The theory of Numbers has always been regarded as one of the most obviously useless branches of Pure Mathematics." - G.H.Hardy. He might be very disappointed that number theory underpins modern cryptography.
- AlexCoventry 8y agoIf the solutions are that hard to find, you could probably make a commit/ reveal scheme out of it.