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The Thirteenth Root
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News
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By overconvergent
Posted Mon Apr 11, 2005 at 08:07:10 AM PDT
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In The Times today, there was a brief story about a French student who has been called "the greatest human calculator" for finding the 13th root of a 200-digit number in his head.
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Alexis Lemaire took 513 seconds to factor
83689566882369569398373286622256452247267804664938366774973575581573035075704089625288023857831568376802934938201056343363855595931514450415149490709419097704449305660268402771869624155688082648640933
as
2391481494636373^13.
The web site for taking 13th roots gives some background history, indicating some of the tricks of the trade (using logarithms to work out the first few digits of the answer, using other techniques to work out the last few) and it talks about the "warm-up" problem of taking 13th roots of a 100-digit integer.
It also gives reasons for going to 200 digits, one of which is that the above techniques can give the entire number, and that the record for calculating 13th roots of 100-digit numbers is so low that the speed that one can write things down at is a major factor. |
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