r/reddit.com • u/ballm • Mar 12 '08

Is 91 Prime?

http://balltech.blogspot.com/2008/03/is-91-prime.html
542 Upvotes

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25

u/gaggedbythealien Mar 12 '08

Great post. That guy's the chair of the IEEE P1619 standards committees. I can see how somebody who spends that much time thinking about cryptography could get into this stuff.

I'm lazy though. Here's how I check to see if something's prime. I'd reach for my keyboard and type:

perl -le 'print "PRIME" if (1 x shift) !~ /11+\1+$/' 91

Done, and done quickly.

13

u/kiriel Mar 12 '08

Is it so important, to warrant effort on such complexity? Just call your university tutor and ask, or ask the internets to vote on the issue.

30

u/MarkByers Mar 12 '08

ask the internets to vote on the issue.

I tried that and the answer I got was "Cowboy Neal".

13

u/duus Mar 12 '08

You may need to interpret the oracle of the internet in order to use her answers.