4 ms·
Well… the weak Goldbach conjecture has been known for a couple hundred years and my understanding is it's one of those things we've suspected was true but just
by phillmv 13y ago
Well… the weak Goldbach conjecture has been known for a couple hundred years and my understanding is it's one of those things we've suspected was true but just never found a solid way to prove that it was so.
This is a neat result, but no one's surprised, per se.
- jokoon 13y agoBeing able to prove can also bring new pieces of mathematics.
- rdl 13y agoI mostly just meant "any results in the space at all" might change things, and really can only change things for the worse (if you have deployed cryptosystems).
- cantos 13y agoThere are 2 mostly distinct branches of number theory additive and multiplicative. Integer factorization is related to multiplicative number theory, but not really additive (as far as is known). This is a result in additive number theory so you shouldn't be any more concerned than say if a major problem in graph theory or differential equations was solved. The fact that the security of a cryptosystem can only degrade over time is what I find so interesting about them. You can't just plug in a cryptosystem and forget about it. If you want real security you will regularly have to make changes.