My understanding is that most (all?) newly-discovered large prime numbers are found via computer programs. I tried reading upon the methodology to find those numbers but I got lost in the mathematical formulas. My guess is it’s not as simple as “find an odd number then start dividing it by all numbers that are approximately 50% of that number or less, and send an alert when you run the whole series and always get remainders.” I mean…that would work but it seems like the slowest and least efficient way to find primes. Is here some way of explaining this that doesn’t rely on me understanding a formula?
In: Mathematics
I’m not there person to be talking about this because I probably know less than you. I do watch a lot of YouTube videos on math related subjects though. Both previous comments described methods that are used to find primes and another one that I can think of is the simplest of all. A lot of the multi-million figure primes that we find tend to be (2^x)-1. On a side note, computer systems run on 32 or 64 bit systems which is just that formula with x being 32 or 64.
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