the.com/factorization
Breaking a number into the primes that secretly built it all along.
means Rewriting a number as a product of smaller numbers (often primes) that multiply back to the original.
from From 'factor,' borrowed from Latin 'facere' meaning 'to make or do' — a factor is literally one of the makers of a product. 'Factor' entered English in the 1400s via trade and mathematics, and the '-ization' suffix (from Greek '-izein' through French) was bolted on later to name the process of breaking something down into those makers.
- uniqueness
- every integer has exactly one prime factorization
- security backbone
- RSA encryption relies on factoring being brutally slow
- record breaking
- largest factored RSA number took 2700 CPU years
- quantum threat
- Shor's algorithm could factor numbers in minutes