William Stein

This is a book about prime numbers, congruences, secret messages, and elliptic curves that you can read cover to cover. It grew out of undergr- uate courses that the author taught at Harvard, UC San Diego, and the University of Washington. The systematic study of number theory was initiated around 300B. C. when Euclid proved that there are in?nitely many prime numbers, and also cleverly deduced the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, which asserts that every positive integer factors uniquely as a product of primes. Over a thousand years later (around 972A. D. ) Arab mathematicians formulated the congruent number problem that asks for a way to decide whether or not a given positive integer n is the area of a right triangle, all three of whose sides are rational numbers. Then another thousand years later (in 1976), Di?e and Hellman introduced the ?rst ever public-key cryptosystem, which enabled two people to communicate secretely over a public communications channel with no predetermined secret; this invention and the ones that followed it revolutionized the world of digital communication. In the 1980s and 1990s, elliptic curves revolutionized number theory, providing striking new insights into the congruent number problem, primality testing, publ- key cryptography, attacks on public-key systems, and playing a central role in Andrew Wiles’ resolution of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

A Computational Approach

Elementary Number Theory: Primes, Congruences, and Secrets

Barry Mazur

Prime numbers are beautiful, mysterious, and beguiling mathematical objects. The mathematician Bernhard Riemann made a celebrated conjecture about primes in 1859, the so-called Riemann Hypothesis, which remains to be one of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics. Through the deep insights of the authors, this book introduces primes and explains the Riemann Hypothesis. Students with minimal mathematical background and scholars alike will enjoy this comprehensive discussion of primes. The first part of the book will inspire the curiosity of a general reader with an accessible explanation of the key ideas. The exposition of these ideas is generously illuminated by computational graphics that exhibit the key concepts and phenomena in enticing detail. Readers with more mathematical experience will then go deeper into the structure of primes and see how the Riemann Hypothesis relates to Fourier analysis using the vocabulary of spectra. Readers with a strong mathematical background will be able to connect these ideas to historical formulations of the Riemann Hypothesis.

Prime Numbers and the Riemann Hypothesis

This book introduces prime numbers and explains the famous unsolved Riemann hypothesis.

William Stein

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