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...