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Science 29 August 1986:
Vol. 233. no. 4767, pp. 938 - 939
DOI: 10.1126/science.233.4767.938
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Articles

Prime Tests and Keeping Proofs Secret

GINA KOLATA

Stanford, California. On 29 July through 2 August, a group of computer scientists, mathematical physicists, and mathematicians met at Stanford University for a conference on Mathematics and Computers. It was a varied meeting—the talks ranged from the mathematics of chaos to a talk by the peripatetic Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos on number theory problems that might be interesting to work on. In addition, software vendors set up shop, inviting investigators to bring their problems and try them on different systems.

On the last day of the conference, when the talks were in the field of computational complexity—the difficulty of doing certain computer calculations—two new computer science tricks were presented and are recounted here.

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)