Today's reading was on Fermat factoring and p-1 factoring.
Fermat factoring was pretty simple to understand. The idea of completing the square to factor is pretty well discussed in high school algebra, and this is very similar to the quadratic formula. On the other hand p-1 is kind of weird. I suppose that is because this is a probabilistic attack on RSA and it will take a bit of work to understand that fully. Almost like approximating a function with a power series. but I don't understand the gcd(b-1,n)=1 mod (n) part, why compute all of the bj's if you don't use them? At least, the statement of the theorem doesn't show how they are used. Perhaps during the lecture their use will be made more clear.
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