Twin Prime Proof Erroneous 199
mindriot writes "The fairly recent perceived breakthrough in prime number theory regarding twin primes, as mentioned on slashdot, is apparently not quite perfect: 'On April 23rd, Andrew Granville of the Universite de Montreal and K. Soundararajan of the University of Michigan found a technical difficulty buried in one of the arguments in the preprint of Goldston and Yildrim. The main issue is that some quantities which were believed to be small error terms are actually the same order of magnitude as the main term. For now this difficulty remains unresolved.' A more detailed technical description is also available."
wow, that's gotta suck (Score:5, Insightful)
man. i feel sorry for those guys
Re:A serious question - i'm not trolling, honest! (Score:2, Insightful)
IANAMathGeek, but (Score:3, Insightful)
What is really important (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How to be a threat to national security (Score:1, Insightful)
see: here [utm.edu] for proving primality and
here [utm.edu] for some other interesting facts about primes.
Why do I point you to pages about primes, when you're talking about factoring? Well, the tests for primality and the tests for factors happen to be contrapositives, and so a particular test will find both--though certain properties about primes allow short-cuts that factoring won't allow.