OFFSET
10,1
COMMENTS
William Stanley Jevons apparently thought it was unlikely that anyone could factor this number. On modern computers, however, this task takes just a fraction of a second. For example, PARI almost instantly returns 8616460799 = 89681 * 96079.
Donald E. Knuth points out that "Fermat could have factored N in less than 10 minutes, on the back of an envelope".
REFERENCES
D. E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2, Seminumerical Algorithms, Third Edition.
LINKS
S. W. Golomb, On factoring Jevons' number, Cryptologia, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1996), 243-246.
W. S. Jevons, The Principles of Science - A treatise on logic and scientific method, (1913), 123 (digitized copy at the Internet Archive).
D. N. Lehmer, A theorem in the theory of numbers, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 13, No. 10 (1907), 501-502.
MathWorld, Jevons' Number.
Numericana, Factoring into primes (see "(2009-01-17) Jevon's number: 8616460799").
EXAMPLE
The number is the integer 8616460799.
PROG
(PARI) digits(8616460799)
CROSSREFS
KEYWORD
AUTHOR
Felix Fröhlich, May 29 2016
STATUS
approved