Recently, there have been a couple new revelations about number theory published in Science Within the article was a pair of theories about prime numbers that I had never heard before, one of which was:
Goldbach’s conjecture, [which] makes two assertions: that every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes, and that every odd number greater than 5 is the sum of three primes.
I thought it would be fun to start with the first part of this problem and write a program to accept user input in the form of an even integer > 2 and then look for the two primes whose sum is equal to the user provided:
prime1 + prime2 = user input
where prime1 and prime2 may be any prime number (even the same number twice)
I could easily see this escaping the processing power of my machine if the numbers get high, but I think it shouldn’t be too hard to at least write a code that could look for them and demonstrate whether this worked with known input.
Are you up for a quick challenge?
Learn Fractions with Zombies
If so, submit your documented answer here as a comment. Feel free to use any language you would like (I just did it in C++, but I’m eager to see better answers than my own). My favorite submissions will win a free copy of my iBook, In Parts, Tales of Fractional Zombies, which you can enjoy yourself or regift to a youngster in your life who wants a fun way to learn the concept of fractions.
You can use these links as resources to help check your work:
If you are new to coding and are looking for a coding environment to work in, check out this posting for help setting up a C++ coding environment using Xcode (on your mac)
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