Applications of Number Theory

Number theory was labeled the "Queen of Mathe matics" by Gauss. For many years it was thought to
be without many practical applications. That situation has changed significantly in the twentieth century
with the rise of computers.

Prime and composite numbers play an important role in modern cryptography or coding systems.
Huge volumes of confidential information (credit card numbers, bank account numbers) and large
amounts of money are transferred electronically around the world every day, all of which must kept
secret. One of the important applications of number theory is keeping secrets.

Using Fermat's theorem, a computer can quickly compute if a number-even a large number-is prime.
However, once a computer finds out that a number is not prime, it then takes a long time to find out what
its factors are, especially if the number is a large composite (say 120 digits long). It can take years on a
supercomputer to find the prime factors of large composite numbers.

This time gap between finding out if a number is prime and factoring the primes in a composite
number is useful to cryptographers. To create a security system, they invent numerical codes for the
letters and characters of a message. Then they use an encoding algorithm (a series of steps to solve a
problem) to turn a message into a long number. If the message is more than a certain length, say 100
characters, then the cryptography program breaks the message into blocks of 100 characters. Once the
message is translated into a number, the program multiplies the number of an encoded message by a
certain prime (which could be a 100 digit number) and by a composite number. The composite number is
the product of two prime numbers, which have been randomly selected and which must be in both the
encoding algorithm of the sender and the decoding algorithm of the receiver. The prime numbers making
up the composite number are usually quite long (100 digits and longer). When the message is transmitted
from the sender to the receiver, some of the numbers are made public, but the primes that make up the
composite number are kept secret. They are only known by the decoding algorithm of the authorized
person who receives the message. Anyone who is eavesdropping on the transmission will see a lot of
numbers, but without the prime numbers from the encoding and decoding programs, it is impossible to
decode the message in any reasonable time.

Computer cryptography systems are only one application of number theory. Other formulas of
number theory allow computer programs to find out many years in advance what days of the week will
fall on what dates of the month, so that people can find out well in advance what day of the week
Christmas or the Fourth of July will occur. Many computers have preinstalled internal programs that tell
users when they last modified a file down to the second, minute, hour, day of the week, and date of the
month. These programs work thanks to the formulas of number theorists.

Resources

Books

Davenport, Harold. The Higher Arithmetic: An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers. 6th ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Dunham, William. The Mathematical Universe. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994.
Peterson Ivars, The Mathematical Tourist: Snapshots of Modern Mathematics. New York: W.H. Freeman
and Company, 1988.

Rosen, Kenneth. Elementary Number Theory and Its Applications. 4th ed. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2000.

Stopple, Jeffrey. A Primer of Analytic Number Theory: From Pythagoras to Riemann. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Vinogradov, Ivan Matveevich. Elements of Number Theory. Dover Publications, 2003.

Weisstein, Eric W. The CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics. New York: CRC Press, 1998.

Periodicals

"Finessing Fermat, Again: The Wily Proof may Finally Be Finished." Scientific American 272.2
(February 1995): 16.

Source: http://science.jrank.org