The University of Arizona
Department of Mathematics
SWRIMS High School Workshops

Interesting Webpages related to
Factoring and Primality Testing

Try searching the web (via Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc.) for any of the following keywords: "Factoring", "Primality", "Prime Number", "Fermat Number", "Mersenne", "Number Field Sieve", "Quadratic Sieve", "RSA", "public key cryptography".

Mersenne Numbers and Mersenne Primes:
(Definition: the mth Mersenne Number is M_m = 2^m-1)

• http://www.mersenne.org
  Starting point for all sorts of good sites. A few good ones are given below.
• http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm
  Join GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search), and make history finding the next Mersenne prime!
• http://www.mersenne.org/status.htm
  Status of how far the search has gone, and how many Mersenne primes have been found along the way.

Fermat Numbers and Fermat Primes:
(Definition: the nth Fermat Number is F_n = 2^{2^n}+1)

• http://www.mersenne.org/fermat.htm
  Status of what is known about Fermat numbers: which are completely factored, which are known to be composite (but not yet factored), which are unknown.

• http://ballingerr.xray.ufl.edu/proths/fermat.html
  More complete status, including new entries from 1998; join the factoring projects, and your name might be added to the list!

Cryptography and the RSA public-key cryptosystem:

• http://www.rsa.com
  All sorts of information about the RSA cryptosystem.

Internet Security:

• http://www.digicrime.com
  Fun site with lots of contributions by people who are professionally involved in factoring, cryptography, internet security.
• http://www.l0pht.com/advisories.html
  Read about some surprising internet security flaws.