Erdös [8] conjectured that there are x 1;o(1) Carmichael numbers up to x, whereas Shanks [24] was skeptical as to whether one might even nd an x up to which there are more than p x Carmichael numbers. Alford, Granville and Pomerance [2] showed that there are more than x 2=7 Carmichael numbers up to x, and gave arguments which even convinced Shanks (in person-to-person discussions) that Erdös must be correct. Nonetheless, Shanks's skepticism stemmed from an appropriate analysis of the data available to him (and his reasoning is still borne out by Pinch's extended new data [14,15]), and so we herein derive conjectures that are consistent with Shanks's observations, while tting in with the viewpoint of Erdös [8] and the results of [2,3].

Abstract. We get an upper bound of O(x 5/14+o(1) ) on the number of Carmichael numbers ≤ x with exactly three prime factors. 1.

Using simple examples and informal discussions this article surveys the key ideas and major advances of the last quarter century in integer factorization.