Why the hell do we need the first gorillion digits of pi or more fucking prime numbers? What a waste of time and money!

Why the hell do we need the first gorillion digits of pi or more fucking prime numbers? What a waste of time and money!

My primary school math teacher challenged us to memorize pi's decimals till the first zero.

I still remember them: 3.14159265358979323846264338327950 (didn't Google)

We don't need more digits of pi than 3.14

People who obsess over that are just autists.

Prime numbers are another story though. Knowing big prime numbers is important because for security reasons, we want to construct long numbers which have reaaaally big primes as factors.

Obviously, right now we have enough prime big primes but in the future the primes that today are big will be too easy to find by big computers and the future algorithms of prime factorization, so mathematicians working in security will need bigger and bigger primes to construct bigger and bigger numbers.

So basically, we will always need new primes my man.

You'll be sorry when you're flying your rocket ship and it suddenly blows up because the programmer forgot to program in that extra digit of pi.

No device on earth needs more than 30 digits of pi, not even fucking LHC or the ISS. And we already know the first 30 digits.

>And we already know the first 30 digits.
I don't think so.
You need a circle of enormous radius to calculate that.
Best estimates are made from probes visiting Jupiter.
You need to make an estimate based on the sun's disk to have such accuracy.
Only problem is, you can only get so far.

>"no device on earth needs more than 125kb of RAM, guess we should stop there"

-bill gates, 1975

>You need a circle of enormous radius to calculate that.

lol

aaagh shit, i took the bait

>we need the first gorillion digits
What do you mean by "we", Peasant?

most things since have been due to bad programming and gaymurs desu

>So basically, we will always need new primes my man.

Not after quantum computers break RSA.

When is this quantum shit coming out? I been hearing about it for years but no actual results. Is it just more conspiracy theory BS? I'm really starting to think it's along the lines of lizard people living on the moon/center of the Earth shit.

No one really knows. Could be 15 years, could be 80 years. Probably not much outside of that range.
That being said, the NSA might already have a working quantum computer.

>No one really knows.
>Could be
>Probably
>might
Come back when you can reply with more confidence please.

>predicting the exact timeline of future technological developments

I can only work with what I've been given, user.

Let me put it this way: Google and other parties are already working on post-quantum cryptography. They see it as an imminent problem that requires a solution *now*.

I'm basically asking to show me why this isn't lizard people technology. (Translation: Show me why this isn't overly paranoid conspiracy theory BS)

I been hearing about this quantum computing crap since 2007ish, and I'm sure it's been going on for even longer. But I haven't heard of a single ounce of results. It's pretty much pure "theory".

There are many technical challenges that need to be overcome. Some of them have been overcome, others haven't. The media likes to report on every little breakthough, hence the hype.

for testing complexity in
algorithms

>They see it as an imminent problem that requires a solution *now*.

They don't see it as a problem that needs a solution now, that is bullshit. They see it as a problem that will take a long time to be solved so you better fucking start now.

>Why the hell do we need the first gorillion digits of pi

We really don't

>or more fucking prime numbers?

Cryptography.