Classic Math Puzzle Cracked

An anonymous reader writes "This is cool - if mind-bending. A century ago, a self-taught math genius from India noticed some patterns in how numbers can be created by adding other numbers. Now a grad student has finished the job showing that the patterns apply to all prime numbers, not just some. There's more on the Indian math guy here."

Comments

Can you break it down a little more, please?

[nulbit]

From summary: some patterns in how numbers can be created by adding other numbers Fucking genius!

Incest?

[rbarreira]

His mother became his wife? Or his cook became his wife?

Timothy is racist

[Hao Wu]

How would you like those to call you "the white editor of Slashdot"? You do not like Indian people, I believe.

Buy my product today!

[rice_burners_suck]

This is a disaster for computer security. It means that all forms of cryptography, which governments, banking systems, businesses, and individuals use to protect online communications, persistent data, and various form of digital assets, will immediately become obsolete, as crackers will now have the ability, using the proof to this theorem, to crack any form of encryption within a matter of seconds, rather than centuries.

However, if you buy Lightning Shadow Software's new product, Vault Protector Pro Gold Platinum Edition, your data will be protected under uncrackable encryption and it will be 100% safe. Simply send an envelope stuffed with cash to my P.O. box address, which I will post here tomorrow, after I file the papers to form Lightning Shadow Software.

Re:outsourcing? was: Re:Srinivasa Ramanujan?

[Ohreally_factor]

and remember when an oversea-er held a whip and bossed us around?

Re:Know your math department

[Perdo]

"Imaginary numbers were so named because no one figured they had real world uses: today, they're taught as a practical matter for electrical engineers to use in their electronics calculations."

That is very wrong.

Gauss, (hmm.. where have I heard that name before) invented imaginagry numbers because in electricity, negative values are as real as positive values, and math regains symetry through imaginary numbers so that we can find the root of -1, a very real value in gee, magnetism perhaps?

And about the name?

Gauss was french, and while imaginary has stuck, the proper translation is image-less. While imaginary has connotations of being of the mind or made up, image-less means invisible, or directly as it was described, as having no image on the "real" number line.

Better might be visible and invisible, instead of real and imaginary. Best is certainly Image-less, as it is a direct translation of what Gauss was referring to.

Re:Why is this important to us?

[xtord]

You're wrong.

You cannot decompress that stream since if you compress
0011 you get 01
Please tell me how you distinguish that from just having compressed 01.

Now add length coding so you know the resulting length then you can decompress the earlier example but not:

010011
0101

There are two options, both equally probable.

Compressing something isn't difficult, but if you want it to be able to decompress then you have to think of something more clever.

Read a basic book on information theory and compression.