https://riemannhypothesis.blog/tags/number-theory/ Recent content in Number theory on Understanding the Riemann Hypothesis Hugo -- gohugo.io en markus@recommend.games (Markus Shepherd) markus@recommend.games (Markus Shepherd) Fri, 05 Aug 2016 15:38:11 +0000 https://riemannhypothesis.blog/2016/08/primes-from-a-different-world/ Fri, 05 Aug 2016 15:38:11 +0000markus@recommend.games (Markus Shepherd) https://riemannhypothesis.blog/2016/08/primes-from-a-different-world/ Every textbook on number theory will begin with a treatise on prime numbers; every treatise on prime numbers will begin by emphasising their importance as building blocks or atoms of our number system: every integer can be expressed as a product of prime numbers in one way and one way only. Six is two times three and there is no other way to decompose it.1 Euclid proved this over two thousand years ago and it is so fundamental (hence the name fundamental theorem of arithmetic) to our thinking about numbers that we take it for granted. https://riemannhypothesis.blog/2015/10/a-toy-keyless-encryption-protocol/ Fri, 02 Oct 2015 11:00:37 +0000markus@recommend.games (Markus Shepherd) https://riemannhypothesis.blog/2015/10/a-toy-keyless-encryption-protocol/ Cryptography is a natural application of number theory and so I’d like to write down a few thoughts about it in this blog. (The fact that there are real world applications to number theory deserves some appreciation in itself, but it would throw us too much off track here.) One particularly nice feature of cryptography is the ability to explain its inner workings with real world analogies about security. For instance, one way two parties (who we, by convention, call Alice and Bob) could hide their secrete communication is if Alice writes a letter, puts it in a box, and locks it with a padlock for which both she and Bob have a key, but no one else. https://riemannhypothesis.blog/2014/12/if-one-at-a-time-is-too-difficult-try-all-at-once/ Sat, 27 Dec 2014 12:00:16 +0000markus@recommend.games (Markus Shepherd) https://riemannhypothesis.blog/2014/12/if-one-at-a-time-is-too-difficult-try-all-at-once/ In the past months, I spent as much time as I had on taking online courses at Coursera. One particularly interesting course, both from a mathematical and computational point of view, is Analytic Combinatorics which applies combinatorics (i.e., the art of counting) to the analysis of algorithms by finding formulae, exact or asymptotic, for their running time. It is notoriously difficult to find exact formulae for general combinatorial constructs. Typically, we want to know how many objects, e.