[45646] in Cypherpunks
Re: What ever happened to... Cray Comp/NSA co-development
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Timothy C. May)
Tue Dec 19 22:18:52 1995
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 1995 19:55:23 -0800
To: jirib@cs.monash.edu.au
From: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
At 12:22 AM 12/20/95, Jiri Baum wrote:
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>
>Hello,
>
>tcmay wrote:
>...
>> Prime Factoring? Primes are easy to factor, of course. (Hint: Every prime
>> has two factors.)
>...
>
>Can someone enlighten me as to what the two factors are?
>
>With sensible definitions I've heard you either get one (just itself)
>or four (itself [p], both units [1,-1] and the co-whatsitsname [-p]).
You're looking too deeply. My point was in response to the very common
error people make in talking about "factoring a large prime number." A
prime is actually easy to factor: itself and 1, which is the point I was
making.
(One can quibble about whether 1 is a factor...I include it, though 1 is
admittedly not considered a prime. But this is a quibble, I think.)
--Tim May
Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."
