Jevons’s Number

I had been reading about asymmetrical encryption using public-private key-pairs when I came across a quote that, it struck me, touched upon the essence of key-pairs.

William Stanley Jevons was a 19th century English economist and logician. In his book, A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy, published in 1862, he wrote:

"Can the reader say what two numbers multiplied together will produce the number 8616460799? I think it unlikely that anyone but myself will ever know."
-- William Stanley Jevons

“Unlikely”, Mr. Jevons? Do your two numbers happen to be 89681 and 96079? They must be, because they are the only whole numbers (other than the very obvious 1 and 8616460799) that, when multiplied, produce Jevons’s number.

I know because, just for grins, I wrote a small computer program to look for pairs of whole numbers that will produce Jevons’s number as their product. I may be – probably am – the first person to know the two numbers Jevons used. And now you know, too.

Never say never in a world that has fast computers.