We describe the complete factorization of the tenth Fermat number F 10 by the elliptic curve method (ECM). F 10 is a product of four prime factors with 8, 10, 40 and 252 decimal digits. The 40-digit factor was found after about 140 Mflop-years of computation. We also discuss the complete factorization of other Fermat numbers by ECM, and summarize the factorizations of F 5 ; : : : ; F 11 .

. We describe the complete factorization of the tenth and eleventh Fermat numbers. The tenth Fermat number is a product of four prime factors with 8, 10, 40 and 252 decimal digits. The eleventh Fermat number is a product of five prime factors with 6, 6, 21, 22 and 564 decimal digits. We also note a new 27-decimal digit factor of the thirteenth Fermat number. This number has four known prime factors and a 2391-decimal digit composite factor. All the new factors reported here were found by the elliptic curve method (ECM). The 40-digit factor of the tenth Fermat number was found after about 140 Mflop-years of computation. We discuss aspects of the practical implementation of ECM, including the use of special-purpose hardware, and note several other large factors found recently by ECM. 1. Introduction For a nonnegative integer n, the n-th Fermat number is F n = 2 2 n + 1. It is known that F n is prime for 0 n 4, and composite for 5 n 23. Also, for n 2, the factors of F n are of th...

Abstract. We report the discovery of new 27-decimal digit factors of the thirteenth and sixteenth Fermat numbers. Each of the new factors was found by the elliptic curve method. After division by the new factors and other known factors, the quotients are seen to be composite numbers with 2391 and 19694 decimal digits respectively. 1.

We report the discovery of a new factor for each of the Fermat numbers F 13 ,F 15 ,F 16 . These new factors have 27, 33 and 27 decimal digits respectively. Each factor was found by the elliptic curve method. After division by the new factors and previously known factors, the remaining cofactors are seen to be composite numbers with 2391, 9808 and 19694 decimal digits respectively. 1.