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Abstract: Late this summer, Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal, and Nitin Saxena
(two of whom are undergraduates) released a bombshell in a preprint:
they exhibited a deterministic polynomial-time algorithm that decides
whether an integer is a prime. Although this result was long conjectured,
the result eluded many people for years. The preprint created a stir
in the media, and on the internet, that has yet to die down.
This talk will explain the algorithm and the proof of its efficiency,
and discuss the current state of knowledge about primality and factoring
algorithms.
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