ON FACTORING JEVONS' NUMBER
Solomon W. Golomb · Cryptologia · 1996
In the 1870's, W.S. Jevons anticipated a key feature of the RSA algorithm for public key cryptography, namely that multiplication of integers is easy, but finding the prime factors of the product is hard. He presented a specific ten-digit number whose prime factorization, he believed, would forever remain unknown except to himself. In this paper, it is shown that Jevons' number could have been factored relatively easily, even in his own time.