Customer Reviews

Factorization and Primality Testing (Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is one of the most compact and best organization of material on the subject of factorization and primality.

Written by a promising author, this book explores factorization from the beginning to end, starting with the sieve of Eratosthenes and proceeding to much more complicated material. The book focuses on algorithms, and contains many useful ones, such as how to raise a number a to a power b, mod m. However, the primary focus of the book is factorization, so it contains algorithms for factorizations. They begin with trial division, then progress into Fermat's Algorithm and Pollard Rho. They eventually evolve into one of the strongest methods to date, Quadratic Sieve, and its child, Multiple Polynomial Quadratic Sieve.

This book is certainly a must for amateurs who are exploring the subject.

As far as I can tell this is the first edition of a book written in 1989, almost 20 years ago. Fortunately, the material is still relevant. The author does a good job of presenting the information in a precise manner that is understandable to the reader. Still you will see that the largest Mersenne prime listed in the book is hopelessly out-of-date, and you will find some errors which were never corrected. May I request a second edition for this book as to make it up-to-date?

This book gives you the juicy bits you want for factoring and primality testing. It skips all the theory and presents the algorithims before you to observe and play with. For the amateur, this is an excellent first book.