If you’ve ever doubted that prime numbers could be exciting, Adam Spencer’s entertaining talk will change your mind. With humor and infectious enthusiasm, he dives into the world of monster primes—those gigantic prime numbers that push the boundaries of both human curiosity and computing power.
Let’s rewind for a moment:
A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that has exactly two distinct positive divisors: 1 and itself. The first few primes—2, 3, 5, 7, 11, …—are familiar. Note that 1 is not a prime, a common misconception cleared up by modern definitions to preserve certain desirable properties in number theory.
So why do primes matter?
Apart from being foundational to mathematics itself, prime numbers play a crucial role in cryptography, the science of securing digital communication. Today’s internet banking, private emails, and online purchases rely on the difficulty of factoring very large numbers into primes—a task that becomes exponentially harder as the primes grow.
That’s why there’s an ongoing global quest to discover bigger and bigger primes. Not only is it a fascinating computational challenge, but each new prime may also lead to stronger encryption methods.
In his talk, Spencer shares the thrill of discovering the largest known prime—a number with a jaw-dropping 12.5 million digits.
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