Recent content by baric

Yes, but the complex plane is a necessary part of mathematics. Describing i as a plane-accessing constant is misleading, imo, since that plane exists whether we choose to acknowledge it. To me, that's analogous to saying the only purpose '-' symbol is to allow the use of the negative side of the...

I'm guessing you'll have to write your own. The wiki page gives a good example, though, for factoring 84923. Consider yourself lucky! :P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKS_primality_test

I thought there might have been a non-predictive pattern but it fell apart at 11. Because the primes are a result of a negating process (a sieve), my gut feeling has always been that there's not going to be a general predictive algorithm for the primality of any particular integer.

Like I said, it's totally dependent upon the computer's memory capacity although the size of the sieve does go up factorially with {p-1.. } where p is the series of primes, so you can't really get too far... If you set the sieve limit to 1 billion, for example, your prime sieve stops at...

Can't write code?!? aww, man.. that's the easy part! :)

Time is not altered for the person falling towards the event horizon, but time for him APPEARS to slow to the observer outside the event horizon. What happens is that the light from the faller (what the observer sees) slows to a trickle as the faller gets closer to the event horizon. This makes...

this is amazing news. I am very happy. I think Osama not paying the price for 9/11 has been weighing on the minds of a lot of Americans for a long, long time.

It's not the criticism, it's the supposed indignation. You cannot apply logic in that fashion to morality, which is based upon commonly-agreed upon standards of behavior. If person A commits a "bad act" but then claims it's not worthy of criticism, then he has no grounds for criticizing...

Why do you think the universe started out as a black hole if, by your own logic, nothing than escape it?

Honestly, the United States lost any moral authority to criticize the membership of the human rights council when we decided to systematically torture prisoners.

One more point. Keep in mind that the sieve can be built dynamically as the prime number search continues. So you could start with a small sieve {30k+n...} and factor the primes to 210. From that point, you already have the sieve for {210k+n... } where 'n' is the series of primes up to 210...

Well, there's definitely a trade-off. You reduce the numbers to be sieved at the cost of increasing the size of the sieve. A sieve stopping at 2 gives you a 50% reduction and a sieve size of 1 (the minimum anyway). At 3, you get a 67% reduction and a sieve size of 2. (1*2) At 5, you get a...

Your {6k-1, 6k+1} sieve reduces the quantity of numbers to check by 1/3 over the simpler (2n+1} sieve. This is simply because you've added the next prime into your algorithm. Similarly, you can reduce the quantity of numbers to check by another 20% by incorporating 5 into your algorithm...

haha, unfortunately Bob, i has a very specific mathematical value and, as a result, e ^ipi = -1. If you indeed replace i on the right side of the equation with a unicorn, it will be zeroed out by sin(pi). However, on the left side of the equation, that unicorn must still be sitting...