That would be *very* few. Only those who have access to water-cooled mainframes they can use for personal purposes. Numbers which are factorised now are immensely huge, far beyond the capability of Windows Calculator. I think posting a factorisation of such a number without sources would have to be deleted as not being reasonably verifiable.
molu
Message: 11 Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 21:28:22 +0000 (GMT) From: Matt R Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia-X-Files To: English Wikipedia Message-ID: 20060510212822.34571.qmail@web25015.mail.ukl.yahoo.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 5/10/06, Matt R wrote:
I've got a feeling that the factorisation of an RSA number (either [[RSA-200]] or [[RSA-640]], I forget which) was scooped by Wikipedia last year; or at least, I couldn't find any public announcement that predated it at the time.
Incidentally, factorisations of challenge numbers are one of those exceedingly rare occasions where researchers can publish original research on Wikipedia without it being a problem for us.
Because readers can verify the fact by multiplying the numbers together?
Yes, or at least some can ;-)
-- Matt
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