Mathematical feat accomplished years ahead of expectations.

BULLETIN: On September 7, 2013, Ryan Propper eclipsed Wagstaff's record when he found an 83-digit prime factor of a 237-digit number using the Elliptic Curve Method.


Purdue University faculty member and CERIAS Fellow Samuel Wagstaff announced two world records in computer-based math -- one of which was accomplished years before experts had expected it might occur.

He announced record factorizations by the Elliptic Curve Integer Factoring Algorithm, primes of 79 and 75 decimal digits. Although the 75-digit prime was no surprise, the 79-digit prime factor should not have appeared for many more years.

Technical version for number theorists.

Non-technical version for those not familiar with number theory.

The computations were done on cores of the compute clusters Hansen and Carter in the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing at Purdue University, which were purchased in part with NFS Grant DMS-1068350, whose support is gratefully acknowledged. Professor Wagstaff's research is also supported, in part, by the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS).


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(This page last modified September 9, 2013)