Back in 2002, Agrawal and two of his graduate students attained hero status by solving a math problem that folks had been working on since the ancient Greeks: How to tell for sure if a number is prime relatively quickly, without having to check all possible factors of the number.
For many conservationists, the near-extinction of numerous whale populations in the seventies, and their continued threatened status today, is emblematic of a much more severe problem: the wholesale harvesting, whether for human consumption or for industry, of too many living things from the sea.