Mostly because of their importance in some types of asymmetric cryptography (Diffie-Hellman, RSA) I have a fascination with prime numbers. I enjoy occasionally checking on the latest discovery of ever larger prime numbers. As I write the largest known prime has more than 17, 425, 170 digits in it. That’s a big-ass number! Many…
In my last post I offered two different examples for generating prime numbers using python. The first script in that post generated every prime (except 2) from 1 to 9,999,999 and the second script generated every prime in a user-supplied range. It’s neat to be able to generate a bunch of prime numbers but what…
Perhaps just a step up from writing your first “Hello World” script. I wrote [yet another] prime number generator. I’m sure this can be done in a variety of ways but I used what I currently know to figure out how to determine if a number is prime. Here’s the code: #!/usr/bin/env python print “2…
I have been teaching myself Python for more than a few years. To be clear, that means that I think about python for about a week, do a lot of reading, stay up late trying some real basic code, get distracted by other shiny things, allow weeks or months to go by, and forget almost…