Apologies

Apologies to those for whom this page was incorrectly blocked.

What

I guess it's a prerequisite to know what Generalised Fermat Numbers (GFNs) are, and quite why people are looking for them. For that information, there's no place better than Yves Gallot's GFN Search page. In particular, note that you must use the right program to test these numbers - use "Proth" only for the higher exponents' smaller bases, and use "GeneFer80" for the smaller exponents' larger bases. Yves' site indicates where the cutoffs occur.

We're doing prefiltering so that you don't have to.

I got "primes fatigue" and turned over all of my machines to doing this dirty job. Initally, I was using 15 legacy machines of 200-600 MHz, but I've quit that job and am doing it all on my faster home machines. If you think you can tie up a machine for, say, a month or more, please contact me (see below). It's impossible to throw too much CPU power at this task!

Where

These pages are divided at present into five sections. They are:

• Maths -- A description of what's going on here and details about the project, its context, and the algorithms used. This might be the place to start if you've come to this page for the first time.
• News -- Updated every few days (or when I think of it), this page gives a quick and dirty update on what's going on with the various ranges.
• Status -- If the news page didn't provide enough detail for you, look here for more in-depth information.
• Reservations. For 8192, 16384, 32768 and 65536 an automated reservation and range-serving database is now online. Presently Yves is managing the 131072 range and above manually still.
• Analysis -- Out-of-date analyses of sieving depth.

And if none of that interests you, perhaps you'd like to hop over to Anna's site, where a variety of weird and in some cases interesting stuff is growing. (Phil will probably remove this bit when he notices it here.)

Who

While my email address can be found elsewhere in these pages, here it is in large, friendly letters:

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