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Category Archives: primes
A few words about PWW #27
The images in my last post were particular realizations of the famous Sieve of Eratosthenes. The basic idea of the sieve is to repeatedly do the following: Circle the next number bigger than that is not yet crossed out, call … Continue reading
Posted in pattern, pictures, posts without words, primes
Tagged Eratosthenes, prime, sieve
4 Comments
More on Fermat witnesses and liars
In my previous post I stated, without proof, the following theorem: Theorem: if is composite and there exists at least one Fermat witness for , then at least half of the numbers relatively prime to are Fermat witnesses. Were you … Continue reading
Posted in computation, number theory, primes
Tagged Carmichael, Fermat, liar, primality, test, witness
Fermat witnesses and liars (some words on PWW #24)
Let be a positive integer we want to test for primality, and suppose is some other positive integer with . There are then four possibilities: and could share a common factor. In this case we can find the common factor … Continue reading
Posted in computation, number theory, posts without words, primes
Tagged Fermat, liar, primality, test, witness
1 Comment
The Fermat primality test and the GCD test
In my previous post we proved that if shares a nontrivial common factor with , then , and this in turn proves that is not prime (by Fermat’s Little Theorem). But wait a minute, this is silly: if shares a … Continue reading
Making the Fermat primality test deterministic
Let’s recall Fermat’s Little Theorem: If is prime and is an integer where , then . Recall that we can turn this directly into a test for primality, called the Fermat primality test, as follows: given some number that we … Continue reading
Posted in computation, number theory, primes
Tagged deterministic, Fermat, primality, test
1 Comment