[webdva]

> The first thing to realize is that until the advent of public key cryptography in the 1970's, few people cared about factoring. Some people were interested in it for its intrinsic beauty, but nobody thought it was good for anything, and it certainly wasn't the notorious unsolved problem it is today. If anything, it was mildly obscure.

"There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world." - Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky

Applied mathematics is a problem looking for a solution and pure or abstract mathematics is a solution looking for a problem. An instance of this is the extension of the set of complex numbers called the quaternions discovered long ago which eventually found their application in affairs that require the representation of orientations in three dimensions, such as in computer graphics.

It seems here then that a motivated entrepreneur can establish a remunerative business should he or she find a solution to this prime factoring problem.