Day 24 in Mat310

Today: Perfect Numbers and Mersenne Primes

• Announcements:
  • Majors and minors are invited to lunch on April 21 (noon - 2:00pm), and to
  • Chris Christensen's sabbatical talk (2:00pm in ST 255).
  • Please also invite other students who you think might be interested in a mathematics major or minor.

• Return homework 6.1:
  • #12 in detail

• Haven't finished homework 7.2 - sorry!: #1, 6

• Collect homework 7.3

• Apologies for screwing up the inverse for Hill's: what I wrote only works when the determinant is 1.

• Perfect numbers and Mersenne Primes
  • section 10.2 summary
  • Problems: #3, 7

• Pythagorean Triples
  • section 11.1 summary
  • Problems, p. 240: #7

Links

• Most recent Mersenne prime news. Latest as of today, Thu Apr 6 11:39:47 EDT 2006:
  43rd Mersenne Prime, 2^30,402,457-1
  found December 15, 2005.

  Last year when I taught this course I was reporting the discovery of the 42nd Mersenne Prime (found February 18, 2005). They keep coming! Don't use these in your RSA encryption scheme: they're both more than a million digits long....

• Another Mersenne hero-worship page!