Definition:Jevons' Number
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Definition
Jevons' number is the number $8 \, 616 \, 460 \, 799$.
It is $89 \, 681 \times 96 \, 079$.
Also see
Source of Name
This entry was named for William Stanley Jevons.
Historical Note
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)
- Jul. 1996: Solomon W. Golomb: On the Factorization of Jevons' Number (Cryptologia Vol. 20: pp. 243 – 244)
- Weisstein, Eric W. "Jevons' Number." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/JevonsNumber.html