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What's the practicality of knowing that there's infinite number of primes?
by nvrrdt 5y ago
What's the practicality of knowing that there's infinite number of primes?
- PaulHoule 5y agoIt's a fundamental fact about the theory of primes which has practical applications such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem)
- mkl 5y agoRSA requires a lot of big primes to exist (so the search space is large), but doesn't require infinitely many. For each key size there's a maximum prime size that matters, and all RSA cryptography that's used in practice would work fine if there were, say, no primes with more than a million digits.