Saturday, July 30, 2016

Calca

I found this little gem of a tool called Calca. It is a text editor symbolic calculator.

Monday, June 06, 2016

Two-hundred-terabyte maths proof is largest ever

A computer cracks the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem — but is it really maths?

Three computer scientists have announced the largest-ever mathematics proof: a file that comes in at a whopping 200 terabytes, roughly equivalent to all the digitized text held by the US Library of Congress. The researchers have created a 68-gigabyte compressed version of their solution — which would allow anyone with about 30,000 hours of spare processor time to download, reconstruct and verify it — but a human could never hope to read through it.

Click here for more information.

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Fermat's Last Theorem Prize Approved

It was a problem that had baffled mathematicians for centuries -- until British professor Andrew Wiles set his mind to it.

"There are no whole number solutions to the equation xn + yn = zn when n is greater than 2."

Otherwise known as "Fermat's Last Theorem," this equation was first posed by French mathematician Pierre de Fermat in 1637, and had stumped the world's brightest minds for more than 300 years.

In the 1990s, Oxford professor Andrew Wiles finally solved the problem, and this week was awarded the hugely prestigious 2016 Abel Prize -- including a $700,000 windfall.

Click here for more information.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Mathematicians Discover Prime Conspiracy

Two mathematicians have uncovered a simple, previously unnoticed property of prime numbers — those numbers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. Prime numbers, it seems, have decided preferences about the final digits of the primes that immediately follow them.

Among the first billion prime numbers, for instance, a prime ending in 9 is almost 65 percent more likely to be followed by a prime ending in 1 than another prime ending in 9.

Click here for more information.

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

49th Known Mersenne Prime Found!

On January 7th, GIMPS celebrated its 20th anniversary with the discovery of the largest known prime number, 274,207,281-1. Curtis Cooper, one of many thousands of GIMPS volunteers, used one of his university's computers to make the find.

Click here for more information.