Pingie: HTTP:: A Trillion Triangles Calculated

HTTP:: A Trillion Triangles Calculated
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Although it may seem like mathematical problems from the past are behind us, and our researchers deal with more abstract and complex calculations, this is not the case, as evidenced recently by a new computer effort by an international team of experts. Scientists from North and South America, from Europe, and Australia have used a large supercomputer to calculate possible solutions for a 1,000-year-old problem. The exercise requires which whole numbers can be the area of a right-angled triangle whose sides are whole numbers or fractions. This has been surprisingly hard to determine.Among mathematicians, the area of such a triangle is called a “congruent number.” While smaller congruent numbers are fairly easy to find, and most of them have already been calculated, the larger ones are enormously difficult to calculate. In fact, the authors of the new investigation say that the numbers with which the computer operated were so long that, if they were to be written by hand,!
they would have covered a distance as large as the one between the Earth and the Moon, and back. “Old problems like this may seem obscure, but they generate a lot of interesting and useful research as people develop new ways to attack them,” American Institute of Mathematics Director Brian Conrey say...
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http://news.softpedia.com/news/A-Trillion-Triangles-Calculated-122304.shtml
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