Talk:Wheel factorization

This article is incomprehensible, even with examples, which do not help describe at all what is going on. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 18.202.1.175 (talk) 11:06, 22 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

the linked-to article at http://primes.utm.edu/glossary/page.php?sort=WheelFactorization was able to describe in its first two sentences what this entire article with its examples completely failed at

Where please is the circle in the example? -- Anon.

The formula at the end of step 4 seems wrong. What's the `7' doing there? -- Ralph Corderoy 15:50, 19 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. You are right. The "7" was accidentally added when trying to type "&". --68.0.120.35 02:07, 2 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Shouldn't part 8 of the example be "the non-primes 4 and 25" rather than "a non-prime 25"? 137.219.45.89 06:35, 6 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The '4' has a strike through - although it's practically invisible on my browser (Firefox, Ubuntu) 144.138.33.93 06:18, 26 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

yup, same on chrome. It's a font issue i suppose Jetru (talk) 14:28, 4 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"xn + 1 to (x + 1)n" ? Wouldn't it be better to just write "xn + 1 to xn + n" ? -- Anon. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.185.249.234 (talk) 20:46, 30 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed! Shows the range more visibly! Made the changes Jetru (talk) 14:28, 4 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This is one of the worst maths pages I have ever seen on Wikipedia, managing to make a simple and obvious idea almost incomprehensible. Since anyone likely to be at all interested in this page will almost certainly be going to write a computer program, the talk of writing numbers in circles is entirely unhelpful. All that needs to be said is that a sieve program can automatically eliminate all multiplies of small primes from consideration by considering only numbers prime to the product of the first few small primes. In that case the blindingly obvious thing to do is to consider numbers modulo 30, because there are exactly 8 possible places where primes can occur (30n+1,7,11,13,17,19,23,29), which is perfect for almost any modern computer where bytes have 8 bits. For example you could find and store all the primes apart from 2,3,5 up to 2^16 in a little over 2000 bytes that way. I wrote a C program that used this technique combined with lookup tables which can count all the primes up to 2^64 and reaches 2^32 in a few seconds HugoBarnaby (talk) 16:27, 24 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. This article is terrible. "Start by writing the natural numbers around circles as shown below" What? Where? What circle? 12.116.117.150 (talk) 19:57, 19 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]