Very cool! I'd say that this one was within reach of Archimedes himself. BTW, it occurred to me that the "Steampunk" alternative universe is a very interesting theory. You could just tell that the Victorians were itching to do some serious calculations, both numerical & algebraic. Perhaps 100 years were wasted on "trivial" and/or "linear" models of things, because we didn't have computers to calculate anything better. An awful lot of engineers during that 100 years were stuck doing far-less-than-optimal designs, because they had no good design tools to work with. Just go back & read some of the engineering textbooks of the 1940's and 1950's. It's heartbreaking, in retrospect. Perhaps if some 19th Century American business tycoon had decided that a Babbage Engine was just the ticket to world domination... At 05:53 PM 9/11/2014, Victor Miller wrote:

There's Lehmer's bicycle sieve: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehmer_sieve

Victor