65537, the last(?) Fermat prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65,537 "65537 is commonly used as a public exponent in the RSA cryptosystem" IETF 4871 (May 2007) "DKIM" *requires* rsa-sha1 with public exponent 65537. (Which is interesting, considering that SHA-1 has been considered insecure since 2005, and Google produced a SHA-1 collision in 2017.) A "square word" architecture having registers that have 256x256 bits each (plus a parity/carry/overflow bit) would be interesting, as it could also be used as a 65536-bit Pratt Boolean Vector Machine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICL_Distributed_Array_Processor Pratt, Rabin, Stockmeyer. "A Characterization of the Power of Vector Machines". STOC74. At 09:43 PM 11/5/2018, Simon Plouffe wrote:
My suggestion : 65537, 65536 or 4294967296 (2^32) Simon Plouffe
Le 2018-11-06 à 03:57, David Makin via math-fun a écrità :
256 obviously !
On 5 Nov 2018, at 22:55, Henry Baker wrote:
I love Pi; I love 2Pi twice as much! (sqrt(2pi) -- don't ask)
However, Pi is too math & physics oriented, and doesn't say anything specifically about computer science.
So what would be the single number that most computer science people would recognize and acknowledge as being representative of computer science?
Some possibilities, just to warm people up:
ln(2) ~ .693 (Computer science people only want logs to base 2!)
phi ~ 1.618 (One of Knuth's favorite numbers)
gamma (Euler's constant) ~ .57722 (related to digital approx to log function) (should this be digital approx to log2 function?!?)
Gibb's constant ~ 1.8519 (Inevitable overshoot for digital/square waves)
Sierpinski triangle dimension ~ 1.58496 (Visual representation of why recursive algorithms can be efficient!)
Any other suggestions?