Sections 3.4-3.6 due April 14th

What was difficult?

Understanding the sections on Fermat's Little Theorem and Euler's Theorem was a bit difficult. The proofs weren't easy to follow, however, I just tried it on enough test cases of my own to convince myself of their validity. The reading of the Three-Pass Protocol was also a little thick for me, so I hope to better understand it when it is mention in class.

Reflections

I found the brief section on modular exponentiation very fascinating. As a computer scientist it is many times in algorithmic designs I try to find shorter and less expense methods of computing something that would seem to take a long time. For example, many times a computer scientist has to look for polynomial time algorithms to solve problems in which brute force would be exponential time. So seeing the example of 2^1234 (mod 789) in which the largest number calculated is 788^2 was interesting.