John Friedlander Colloquim

I found John Friedlander's talk on prime numbers to be very interesting and directly in line with what we have been covering in Cryptography. I was especially intrigued by the twin prime pairs and the question regarding if they are infinite or not. Like most  people I like problems whose statements are easy to understand but less simple to prove. Knowing the different names or classifications of the primes also reinforced to me their importance, such as the Mersenne and Fermat Primes. One connection Mr. Friedlander made that I had not noticed previously was the one with the different steps of the Euclidean Algorithm and the gcd in each step. When he wrote (91,41)=(49,42)=(42,7)=7 the link between the Euclidean Algorithm and the gcds made much more sense. The most confusing part for me was the Sieve of Erathosthenes. In the limited time spent on in I didn't catch exactly how it worked. I did like the Legendre Formula though, even if I didn't fully understand it.