My biggest nightmare, I remember, was when we started studying stereometry in the eleventh grade; I remember that it took me about a month to get Thales’s Theorem only to find out that we had long moved away from it...
In all honesty, back then, not a day had past without my wondering who, on Earth, would stop me in the street one day and ask me:
‘Hey, boy, could you please help me calculate the volume of this parallelepiped?’
(Although, it did happen to be once: I bumped into my math teacher who thought that it’d be hilarious to show my then- girlfriend how little I knew about calculating the volume of 3D objects…)
Having intentionally moved as far away from maths as possible, I was quite surprised to find out that BBC had recently done an interview with the person who had just come up with the largest prime number (one that can only be divided by 1 and itself), namely 257,885,161 − 1. The
number is made up of 17, 425, 170 digits and its name is as difficult as calculating the volume of a parallelepiped in the middle of the street.
The number’s ‘creator’ is a Mr. Curtis Cooper who seems to be incredibly proud of his achievement; and rightly so.
After a lengthy discussion of how the number came to be, Mr. Cooper was asked whether there would be any PRACTICAL use of it to which he chuckled and answered:
‘Naturally.’
At the end of the interview I began wondering what was so ‘natural’ about a number which, if written down, would be longer and bigger than my nose.
Well, here are two uses of prime numbers that not many people are familiar with; and, I must say, those have left me pleasantly amazed and somewhat bemused.
Prime Numbers and Encrypting- the RSA Algorithm
I bet you a penny that you have, at some point of your life, wondered what on Earth is meant by the caption ‘Your Debit/ Credit Card Details Are Secure’ which often comes up when you make a card payment online.
Surely, they can’t keep your card number in its original form on their systems because those can be hacked at any point and that information leaked through various viruses, malware, spyware, Chinese hackers hacking ‘secure’ US media platforms (ha!), etc.
To be kept safe, that information (numbers, names, etc.) is encrypted through, most often, the RSA Algorithm.
I shan’t go into any detail or fully explain how the algorithm works.
All I will say is that there are two parts to it- a PRIVATE KEY and a PUBLIC KEY which operate together. The PUBLIC KEY is devisable by the PRIVATE KEY (which is a several- hundred- digit prime number). In order to decrypt a certain encryption, a party would, thus, need both keys; for instance, when you pay for something on eBay, your browser knows that the webpage contains secure information and requests the PUBLIC KEY from eBay. It then uses the PUBLIC KEY to encrypt the data and sends it to eBay which can decrypt it as it has the PRIVATE KEY.
Et voila! It would also seem that computers (at least in their present form) have a trouble with establishing the PRIVATE KEY via the PUBLIC KEY and cannot, thus, deal with encryptions without both keys (owing to the difficulty in ‘factoring’ a large number, i.e. determining its prime factors).
à For more on the RSA Algorithm, see
Prime Numbers and Nature
I was quite amazed to find out that animals, such as cicadas, also use prime numbers as a survival mechanism.
Apparently, cicadas only mate every 13 or 17 years, i.e. on a prime number. The reason for that, it has been proven, is that most predators mate ever 2, 4, 6, etc. years.
Thus, to increase their survival rates, cicadas have come up with a brilliant idea: to come out and mate when there are the least predators around.
Had they chosen to do so every 12 and 14 years, they would have still been the target of a lot of predators mainly because the above are divisible by 2 (i.e. predators would have gone out to mate as well).
Even though it might sound quite simple for us humans, the above survival strategy seems quite complex for an insect to come up with.
à For more information on the above, please see
In the light of the above, it would seem that Mr. Cooper was quite right to point out that the largest prime number was bound to soon find its practical purpose.
To conclude, I’d like to confer with you that, for the first time in my life, it had been an utmost delight to look into, talk about and discuss a mathematical concept.
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