But what if one was to test 542354235423 was a prime? It would still be a little longer. A small program can find this out in much less than a second. But when the Prime numbers become bigger and bigger, the time taken to test the number for primality increases exponentially – literally! Given the computational ability of Computers, testing if a number is prime or not sounds like a mundane problem. They had invented an algorithm to test if a number was prime or not. It had been an open problem for a long time. They had invented an algorithm to solve a huge problem in Mathematics. When few got the real scoop, the news was even more interesting than the completion of PhD. Two of their own batch mates, friends of many, had completed their PhD and that too How! It took no time for the mails to be circulated, phone calls to be made, yahoo messengers to ring the message among the students who were either working or were furthering their studies. It was December 2002 when suddenly a rumor spread around in the Computer Science students who had just passed out of IITK in May that year that two of their batch mates had completed their PhDs in a matter of few months.
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