Tag Archives: #primenumber

P vs NP – A promise fulfilled

P versus NP – An early encounter

My first programming experience was in the early 80’s. I had bought myself a Texas instruments 58-c programmable calculator, and I was curious what could be done with such a device. That turned out to be very modest.
The calculator was capable of 480 program steps but held then zero memories for data storage. Each memory used for data consumed 8 program steps, so with the storage of e.g. 10 integers, the programming space was diminished with 80 steps.
The 58-c’s memory was retained even after switching off the calculator, but before creating another program, memory first had to be erased. Continue reading →

Mathematical issues

Some remarkable mathematical issues

Although the Dutch newspapers Volkskrant and NRC can be blamed for being too political (D66) biased to be independent as journals ought to be, it must be said that both have excellent science sections.
On an irregular base even topics of mathematical nature have been published.

Of course for a layman’s audience, mathematics lacks the ability of other science disciplines of being easily visualized.
So the topics in these sections were about trivial stuff like the latest calculated decimals of π or some large regions on the number line without any prime number called prime deserts, a newly found Mersenne number, etc.
But that hardly scratches the surface. Continue reading →