What Has A 17th Century French Friar Got To Do With Your Smart Phone Payment?

We increasingly exist in a world where random numbers are generated for our transactions, our network connections, and in our on-line accesses. If there was any weaknesses in the generation of these, we could leave large holes in the Internet. We might even be able to predict the weekly lottery, as here.

One of the most popular pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) is the Mersenne Twister. It was created by Makoto Matsumoto and Takuji Nishimur in 1997 and it derives its name from its period length — which the number of values before the sequence repeats — and which is a Mersenne prime. This page contains on the most commonly used version of the Mersenne Twister algorithm is MT19937 and generates a 32-bit word length (using the Mersenne prime of 2^{19937}−1. The method is named after Marin Mersenne and who was a 17th Century French Minim friar. His main contribution included his investigations of prime numbers, along with being seen as the father of acoustics

The Mersenne Twister method is by far the most popular method of creating random numbers, and is used extensively within many libraries including within mt_rand() in PHP and random.random() in Python.

A Mersenne prime is defined as a prime number that is one less than a power of two. The general form is…