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Comment by padobson | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to rain on anyone's math geek parade, but is there a practical use for discovering primes?

Is there any use beyond crunching giant numbers for theoretical physics and knowing a certain number can't be divided - or is this just the math geek equivalent of knowing the Baltimore Orioles had four 20-game winners in 1971?

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It would certainly be nice if someone improved on the Lucas-Lehmer test, or if someone found another "pattern" that unreliably produces primes like the Mersenne numbers. So in some sense, this search encourages both of those things, although regrettably it's not been enough encouragement for a discovery to be made :-(

There might be, but yeah, that's not the main reason for searching IMO.

See http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html, but it boils down to "something really interesting can be found along the way, primes relate to other important topics so learning about them has intrinsic value, there's some money in it (but you have a 99.9% chance of spending more than the prizes in your search... and you still won't win)".

"Public key crypto algorithms utilize prime numbers extensively; indeed, prime numbers are an essential part of the major public key systems" http://www.sans.org/reading_room/whitepapers/vpns/prime-numb...

but they cannot use "biggest" primes because, typically, security relies on the prime being unknown.

Yes. But they employ techniques that were at the forefront of the search for big prime numbers in earlier times.

Is that how cracking begins? They start with "famously" prime numbers? I've always wondered about this.

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