[1]http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?artid=18900043
   Designed for hot and high conditions Mmm."...third- generation
   anti-tank missile Nag My wifes got that already.
   Speaking of hot and high.Oregen burning,Smog cloud threw monsoon off
   course
    and driest July in 100 years.Is there a runaway green indahouse?
   Thank all the gods for
   [2]http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?artid=18891466
   Chidanand Rajghatta muses about the Indian legacy in mathematics
   following the latest number crunching feat from Kanpur
   On the subject of mathematics, there are two kinds of people the number
   crunchers and the number crunchees i.e., those who can crunch numbers
   with great facility, and those who get crunched by numbers.
   There are those of you who love to develop your quadriceps with
   quadratic equations and have binomial theorem for breakfast. Then there
   are those of us, who, faced with simple multiplication tables, have to
   lie down with a cold wet towel on our forehead.
   Where do you think you belong?
   There is a widespread belief that we Indians have a yen for numbers. It
   might not entirely be true. There are plenty of people even in
   Bharatvarsh who will subscribe to Bill Clintons jocular admonition that
   folks across the world would have been perfectly happy if Bhaskara and
   Brahmagupta had kept their works to themselves.
   Still, in the same spirit that contrived the number zero and the value
   pi, it turns out that Indians are still contributing significantly to
   the world of numbers even now, odd exceptions notwithstanding.
   The announcement this week that three mathematicians from the Indian
   Institute of Technology, Kanpur, have devised a method (or arrived as a
   algorithm , in mathematese) to determine whether a number is prime or
   not has created quite a flutter (or a quiet flutter) in the world of
   numbers.
   Prime numbers, for those of us mathematically challenged, are those
   that are divisible only by itself or by one. Although it sounds simple
   enough, its quite a task to determine what mathematicians call the
   primality of a number. For instance, is 4958372640287988786544 a prime
   number?
   Of course, the more facetious among us can say -- does it really
   matter? Apparently it does in ways that we may not immediately
   comprehend, like for instance, in determining whether the bristles on
   the toothbrush hurts our gums. Thats a joke. But you get the point.
   Some applications are not immediately apparent to the matho-phobics.
   One of the applications of prime numbers is in the world of
   cryptography i.e encryption and code breaking, which may be evident if
   you read the secret passage hidden in the preceding paragraph. Thats
   another joke. Read on.
   For years then, mathematicians have wrestled with ways to determine the
   primality of numbers. There are established methods, but they pose
   problems. One method can determine with absolute accuracy whether a
   number if prime or not, but it is a laborious process.
   Another method can determine the primality of a number far more
   quickly, but with a small probability of error, leading to what Prof
   Krishnaswami Alladi, a leading US-based mathematician calls, industrial
   grade prime number.
   What Messrs Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena of the IIT
   Kanpur did was to arrive at a algorithm that helped determine the
   primality of a number accurately and quickly. But more of that later.
   Prof Alladi is one of the legatees of Indias great tradition in the
   field of numbers that begins with Aryabhata and Brahmagupta. Currently
   Chairman of the Department of Maths at the University of Florida in
   Gainesville, he is an authority on the works of Ramanujan, and he edits
   a publication called The Ramanujam Journal that deals with the areas
   the great man worked in and influenced.
   Prof Alladis grandfather was part of the group that gave India another
   remarkable document: the Indian Constitution.
   Like Prof Alladi, several other illustrious mathematicians of Indian
   origin live in America, none more renowned than Prof Harish Chandra,
   who had a distinguished career at Princeton before his death in 1996.
   The current heads of the mathematics department at the University of
   Minnesota (Prof Naresh Jain) and McGill University (Prof
   K.N.Gowrisankaran) are also Indians, and there are numerous others
   crunching away quietly in other groves of academia.
   But what the latest feat illustrates is that you dont have to be in
   America to hit the bulls eye. Having devised their primality test, the
   three Indians put their algorithm up on the IIT Kanpur website and
   e-mailed last Sunday it to well-known mathematicians across the world.
   Among the recipients of this e-mail was Prof Carl Pomerance at Bell
   Labs, an authority on prime numbers.
   No sooner had he seen the algorithm , Prof Pomerance discussed the
   draft with colleagues over lunch, and arranged an impromptu seminar on
   the subject the same afternoon. Within hours, the gathering validated
   the algorithm . We were all quite excited about it, Prof Pomerance told
   this correspondent in an interview on Thursday. They had solved the
   problem quite elegantly and arrived at beautiful result.
   The remarks were typical of math aficionados, who see beauty and
   elegance in numbers and equations that we number crunchees see in words
   and phrases.
   Mathematicians can also be delightfully quirky. We of course know the
   famous episode how Ramanujan, receiving Prof Hardy by his hospital bed,
   startled him by analysing impromptu the properties of his taxi cab
   number.
   Prof Pomerance is a mathematician in the same vein. One of his papers,
   published in the Journal of Recreational Mathematics, revolves around
   the interesting properties of the numbers 714 and 715, which was the
   number of home runs scored by Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron respectively.
   But to return to the story, there are two striking aspects to the
   IIT-ians prime numbers saga. One is how quickly the algorithm was
   shared across the world and validated by peers, thanks to the Internet.
   (Ironically, the so-called primality testing plays a crucial role in
   the widely used RSA algorithm, which is used to secure transactions
   over the Internet).
   In fact, attending Prof Pomerance seminar on Monday was Anupam Gupta, a
   computer scientist at Bell Labs who happens to work just down the
   corridor from the mathematician. Gupta is also from IIT-Kanpur, but he
   did not know the prime numbers trio. What he did recognise was the
   beauty of their algorithm . It was so simple and elegant that even I,
   more a computer scientist than a mathematician, could understand and
   appreciate it, he said.
   The second aspect of course is the longevity of the Indian legacy.
   Whether in India or in the United States, our mathematical bequest is
   alive and ticking (or clicking), and thanks to the Internet, the
   boundaries are even fewer than when Ramanujan shared his genius with
   the west.
   So now we know and can rest assured: Some day, there will be a paper on
   the properties of Tendulkars final tally. India still has the number on
   math.
   HALlo!

References

   1. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?artid=18900043
   2. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?artid=18891466