the.com/factoring
Breaking a number down to its unbribable, indivisible core witnesses: primes.
means Breaking a number (or algebraic expression) down into the smaller pieces that multiply together to make it — the reverse of expanding things out.
from From Latin 'factor,' meaning 'doer' or 'maker,' itself from 'facere,' 'to make' or 'do.' A factor was originally an agent who acts or makes things happen on someone's behalf — the commercial sense of 'middleman' came first. Math borrowed the word for the numbers that 'make' a product by multiplying together, and 'factoring' became the act of finding those hidden makers.
- security backbone
- RSA encryption bets millions that factoring stays hard
- quantum threat
- Shor's algorithm could factor big numbers fast
- business meaning
- also means selling invoices for cash now
- fundamental theorem
- every integer has exactly one prime factorization