The Puzzlers

I am professor at the Vienna University of Technology giving lectures there on discrete mathematics and analysis of algorithms. One of the first problems in number theory I tackled was the notorious factorization of the Mersenne number 2^67-1. It was on an ATARI 800 in the eighties and I remember that it took hours. Today I can compute this on my 2GHZ-machine in 0.03s using Derive. A lot of things have changed since, it is true, but I am still very enthusiastic about number theory and particularly primes.

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