Definition:Jevons' Number/Historical Note
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Historical Note on Jevons' Number
In $1874$, William Stanley Jevons made the assertion:
- Can the reader say what two numbers multiplied together will produce the number $8616460799$? I think it unlikely that anyone but myself will ever know.
History has shown that if an assertion akin to the above has been made, at least one mathematician will attempt to refute it.
In this case it was Derrick Norman Lehmer who, in $1903$, presented its factorisation to the American Mathematical Society.
A contemporary online integer factorisation tool can do the job in a relative instant.
Sources
- 1874: William Stanley Jevons: The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method
- 1903: D.N. Lehmer: A Theorem in the Theory of Numbers (read before the San Francisco Section of the American Mathematical Society, Dec. 19, 1903)
- Weisstein, Eric W. "Jevons' Number." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/JevonsNumber.html