Futility Closet

Witchcraft

Posted in Science & Math by Greg Ross on September 21st, 2007

Mersenne once wrote to Fermat asking whether 100895598169 were a prime number.

Fermat replied immediately that it's the product of 898423 and 112303, both of which are prime.

To this day, no one knows how he knew this. Has a powerful factoring technique been lost?