Why Euler’s Formula for Primes could

disrupt the World

This little known but awesome property about primes may change your
mind about encryption

Frank Zielen
Feb 16 · 3 min read

Image by F. Zielen (original of Euler by J. E. Handmann)

Prime numbers form the foundation of modern encryption. The reason for this is
very simple: until now we have not understood their mathematical nature.
However, the world would change dramatically by demystifying primes. In this
article, I present a little known but awesome property about primes that may
change your mind about cryptography. And don’t worry, it will be a short and
easy understandable read on an executive level.

Refresh and Motivation

Let‘s recap: primes are whole numbers that can only be divided by 1 or the number
itself without remainder. For example, 5 is prime (divisors 1 and 5) but 6 is not
 (divisors 1, 2, 3 and 6).

There are infinite prime numbers but so far there are no efficient algorithms to
determine them. Especially, there is no formula to calculate the n-th prime
number, neither recursively, i.e. we can calculate a prime if we know the preceding
(smaller) primes, nor explicitly, i.e. we can calculate a prime directly without
knowing preceding primes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem)
For example, this makes the famous RSA cryptosystem so secure. Its public key
needed for encryption is based on a product of two (very large) prime numbers. If
you want to derive the private key needed for decryption you “just” need to
determine the prime factors of this product. However, this takes currently so much
computing time that RSA is not unlockable in practice.

But what would happen if we would discover a formula that calculates primes
immediately? This could also generate very fast approaches for prime factorization
which would mean a death sentence for most cryptosystems today. But is it even
possible to find a formula for primes?

The Amazing Euler Product

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler
Leonhard Euler is one of the most brilliant mathematicians the world has ever
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_product
seen. In the 18th century he derived a formula that is called Euler product today.
Here we focus on a special case of his trailblazing discovery. Please don’t stop
reading even if the next line looks like hieroglyphic at first sight.

Euler product
 We translate: the symbol on the left hand side of the equation represents a
product. Furthermore, it is an infinite product over all primes, i.e. we need to
replace the variable p by all prime numbers and multiply the terms. Let’s write it
down to make it clear.

First factors of the Euler product

This means the following: if we calculate the above product inserting ALL prime
numbers we obtain the well-defined result pi²/6. That’s awesome and feels like a
mystery. Please let me tell you why.

Disruptive Consequences
We know that there are infinite prime numbers but we haven’t any closed and
efficient representation (“formula”) for primes. With computing power, we can just
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_known_prime_number
determine the largest known prime number. In spite of this, Euler has proven that
we obtain the value pi²/6 if we multiply all primes according to the Euler product
— although we don’t know all primes!

In My Humble Opinion
IMHO, this shows that there is tremendous knowledge about primes that we
haven’t discovered so far. If we can calculate the Euler product over the infinite set
of primes we should also be able to derive a formula for primes. For example, for
special primes closed representations are already known.

This indicates that we must increase efforts in number theoretical research to

discover the true nature of primes. And the person who may unriddle this quest
will either be celebrated or persecuted.