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Twin Prime Proof Erroneous

Posted by michael on from the 2+2=5 dept.

mindriot writes "The fairly recent perceived breakthrough in prime number theory regarding twin primes, as mentioned on slashdot, is apparently not quite perfect: 'On April 23rd, Andrew Granville of the Universite de Montreal and K. Soundararajan of the University of Michigan found a technical difficulty buried in one of the arguments in the preprint of Goldston and Yildrim. The main issue is that some quantities which were believed to be small error terms are actually the same order of magnitude as the main term. For now this difficulty remains unresolved.' A more detailed technical description is also available."

5 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. wow, that's gotta suck by cheezus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    To think you solved something like that, and to be ready to publish, after all that hard work.... then...... oops. guess that doesns't work

    man. i feel sorry for those guys

    --
    /bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
  2. Re:A serious question - i'm not trolling, honest! by cybercrap · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yes considering a lot of our encryption is based on prime numbers. So you figure a simple way to get around it and you make a lot of encryption outdated and useless. So yes, it is important.

  3. IANAMathGeek, but by Rxke · · Score: 2, Insightful

    it's not pointless, that"s why you were modded down. Now don't ask ME what the point is, i really suck in mathematics (but stil love it though) but if you see somewhere the word 'prime', think computer en/decryption, et. c. i even guess it could be used for cancer research....

  4. What is really important by MrRage · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What would be really important is to prove the Reimann Hypothesis. That would tell us a lot about the distribution of primes.

  5. Re:How to be a threat to national security by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
    You fucking idiot. You have no fucking clue do you? The problem with such exhaustive methods (which is the only possible type of method available), is that with very large numbers with very large factors take an *extremely* long time to factor. This is what everyone has been talking about, though you seemed to have missed the point.

    see: here for proving primality and

    here for some other interesting facts about primes.

    Why do I point you to pages about primes, when you're talking about factoring? Well, the tests for primality and the tests for factors happen to be contrapositives, and so a particular test will find both--though certain properties about primes allow short-cuts that factoring won't allow.