Thursday, October 24, 2013

6.4 up to just before section 6.4.1

Interesting: I think it's crazy how many awesome ideas Fermat came up with. Seriously, were all of these ideas actually his or did he just steal it from people who didn't care to publish or is some of his work actually someone else's that historians decided to attach his name to? But I guess when you think about Euler, Fermat's work pales in comparison as far as breadth goes. Still, Fermat had some pretty crazy ideas and theorems. I do like that there are other methods of factoring large numbers other than checking every prime up to and including the square root of the number, because for large numbers, it's impractical to do this.

Difficult: I'm not sure that I understood the p-1 factoring algorithm very well or at least I don't know how we would know if we picked a "good enough" a and bound B for the algorithm. Also, how would we know when to stop computing?

No comments:

Post a Comment