Indians (hindus) who gave mathemetics to the world have excelled again..

[Guest guest]

Indians (Hindus) who gave mathametics to the world through the arabs have once

again proved they can excell at all times.................

Special: IIT 'algorithm' creates ripples in the US

 

 

 

By K Venkatesh

The international scientific community was truly stunned when the New York Times

reported on a new discovery from IIT Kanpur.

The alacrity with which the Americans woke up to the discovery along with its

far reaching implications in web related technologies surprised many in the US.

 

On the face of it, the discovery sounds simple: how to find out whether a number

is prime or a composite number. This is easy to solve for small numbers but not

for very large numbers. Mathematicians from all over the world have been

working to solve this for more than a few hundred years. This problem had also

haunted theoritical computer scientists.

Now, a truly world-class theoritical computer science achievement has come out

from India solving this.

The ``primality'' algorithm of Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena

of IIT Kanpur, released earlier this month, is the answer to these worries.

Given a number, this algorithm checks whether it is composite (can be divided by

a smaller number, a ``factor'') or prime (the only smaller number dividing it is

1).

The IIT 'algorithm' works better for large numbers than previous methods.

Agrawal is a researcher in his thirties, well known for his work in the

theoritical computer science community. Kayal and Saxena are in their twenties,

and part of this work was done while they were doing their BTech in computer

science.

The primality algorithm just declares a number to be composite but doesn't yield

the smaller number dividing it. If the method can be extended to also give a

smaller divisor (a ``factorization algorithm''), computer programs will be able

to crack security codes---for example---of the kind used in credit cards. So the

whole e-commerce industry will have to operate with new security algorithms.

There have been excellent theoritical computer science results by Indians before

this, but many of them have been working abroad. One of them, Madhu Sudan of

MIT, has just been awarded the Nevanlinna prize, a top award in theoritical

computer science presented at the International Congress of Mathematicians

(recently held in Beijing).

One of the many results he obtained was a better algorithm for checking, given a

mathematical proof, whether it is correct or not. The algorithm, developed with

four other authors, works most of the time but has a small probability of

failure. This means that by running the same program several times, the chances

of a mistake become lower.

An algorithm of this kind was developed for the primality problem by Michael

Rabin many years ago, and the importance of the IIT Kanpur result is that it

always works, with no chance of failure

 

 

 

Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. Click Here