Sieve

A process of successively crossing out members of a list according to a set of rules such that only some remain. The best known sieve is the sieve of Eratosthenes for generating prime numbers. In fact, numbers generated by sieves seem to share a surprisingly large number of properties with the prime numbers.

REFERENCES:

Halberstam, H. and Richert, H.-E. Sieve Methods. New York: Academic Press, 1974.

Hawkins, D. "Mathematical Sieves." Sci. Amer. 199, 105-112, Dec. 1958.

Huskey, H. D. "Derrick Henry Lehmer (1905-1991)." IEEE Ann. Hist. Comput. 17, 64-68, 1995.

Lehmer, D. H. "The Sieve Problem for All-Purpose Computers." Math. Tables and Other Aids to Comput. 7, 6-14, 1953.

Lukes, R. F.; Patterson, C. D.; and Williams, H. C. "Numerical Sieving Devices: Their History and Some Applications." Nieuw Arch. Wisk. 13, 113-139, 1995.

Pomerance, C. "A Tale of Two Sieves." Not. Amer. Math. Soc. 43, 1473-1485, 1996.

Williams, H. C. and Shallit, J. O. "Factoring Integers Before Computers." In Mathematics of Computation 1943-1993: A Half-Century of Computational Mathematics (Vancouver, BC, 1993) (Ed. W. Gautschi). Providence, RI: Amer. Math. Soc., pp. 481-531, 1994.