Big Numbers

Nothing is more fun than mathematics, right? It must then follow that Robert Bradshaw, William B. Hart, David Harvey, Gonzalo Tornaria, and Mark Watkins had more fun last year than anyone else on the planet. This is the team that found all the congruent numbers up to a trillion, a remarkable achievement in the annals of mathematics.

 What makes this feat notable to Dobbs readers is that the software that generated the sequence had to multiply numbers so large they wouldn't fit in 128GB of RAM. According to the team's report, the polynomials used in these calculations ended up requiring .5TB of memory, significantly more than was available on their host machines.



September 28, 2009
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/big-numbers/228701274

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