Thanks,
BTW I forward you a recent news perhaps relevant ...
>Date: Thu, 08 Aug 2002 14:45:25 +0200
>From: Erol Sahin <esahin.domain.name.hidden>
>X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
>To: all.domain.name.hidden
>Subject: Turns out, Primes are in P
>
>
>From slashdot.org
>
>"Manindra Agrawal et. al. of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
>CS department have released a most interesting paper today. It presents
>an algorithm that determines whether a number is prime or not in
>polynomial time. While I haven't gone through the presentation in
>detail, it looks like a promising, albeit non-optimized, solution for
>the famous PRIMES in P problem."
>paper
>http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/primality.pdf
>
>---------
>From NYTimes
>
>New Method Said to Solve Key Problem in Math
>By SARA ROBINSON
>
>Three Indian computer scientists have solved a longstanding mathematics
>problem by devising a way for a computer to tell quickly and
>definitively whether a number is prime -- that is, whether it is evenly
>divisible only by itself and 1.
>
>Prime numbers play a crucial role in cryptography, so devising fast ways
>to identify them is important. Current computer recipes, or algorithms,
>are fast, but have a small chance of giving either a wrong answer or no
>answer at all.
>
>The new algorithm -- by Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena
>of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur -- guarantees a correct
>and timely answer. Though their paper has not been published yet, they
>have distributed it to leading mathematicians, who expressed excitement
>at the finding.
>
>"This was one of the big unsolved problems in theoretical computer
>science and computational number theory," said Shafi Goldwasser, a
>professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of
>Technology and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. "It's the
>best result I've heard in over 10 years."
>
>The new algorithm has no immediate applications, since existing ones are
>faster and their error probability can be made so small that it is
>practically zero. Still, for mathematicians and computer scientists, the
>new algorithm represents a great achievement because, they said, it
>simply and elegantly solves a problem that has challenged many of the
>best minds in the field for decades.
>
>Asked why he had the courage to work on a problem that had stymied so
>many, Dr. Agrawal replied in an e-mail message: "Ours was a completely
>new and unexplored approach. Consequently, it gave us hope that we might
>succeed."
>
>The paper is now posted on the computer science department Web page at
>the Indian Institute of Technology (www.cse.iitk.ac.in).
>
>Methods of determining whether a number is prime have captivated
>mathematicians since ancient times because understanding prime numbers
>is the key to solving many important mathematical problems. More
>recently, attention has focused on tests that run efficiently on a
>computer, because such tests are part of the underlying mathematics of
>several widely used systems for encrypting data on computers.
>
>So-called primality testing plays a crucial role in the widely used RSA
>algorithm, whose security relies on the difficulty of finding a number's
>prime factors. RSA is used to secure transactions over the Internet.
>
>
>On Sunday, the researchers e-mailed a draft of the paper on the result
>to dozens of expert mathematicians and computer scientists. Dr. Carl
>Pomerance, a mathematician at Bell Labs, said he received the paper on
>Monday morning and determined it was correct.
>
>After discussing the draft with colleagues over lunch, Dr. Pomerance
>arranged an impromptu seminar on the result that afternoon.
>
>That he could prepare and give a seminar on the paper so quickly was "a
>measure of how wonderfully elegant this algorithm is," Dr. Pomerance
>said. "This algorithm is beautiful."
Received on Thu Aug 08 2002 - 06:16:02 PDT