At 05:47 PM 8/13/95 PDT, Derek Atkins wrote:

...

-1 -1 v v sqrt(v ) 16 11 ***9 29 29 ***8

***How are these square roots? 9 is certainly not the square root of 11, nor is 8 the square root of 29, even modulo 35.

Bzzt! Try Again. If you use bc, you will notice that 9^2 mod 35 == 11 and 8^2 mod 35 == 29... You should go take your number theory class!

Definitely. Is there an easy way to get from the 29 to the 8? I can see how it goes the other way, but what I didnt' see was how, if given 29, I could get the 8? (Euclid's?)

...

mean "the inverse of v." Are these two expressions interchangeable or is this something that I should have found in the errata?

Yes. It is the multiplicative inverse. This is very basic math. Go re-read your 7th-grade algebra book: v^(-1) == 1/v

Ok. I wasn't thinking of multiplicative inverse when doing this--I guess I wasn't in the right frame of mind.

Take your number theory class, and if you can't figure out after that, re-ask the questions.

I'll take the course, but you still needn't be so swarmy about it. Ben. *********************************************************************** Ben Samman Samman@cs.yale.edu I'm on vacation now, so e-mail will recieve a latency of +/- 24 hours. PGP Key available from keyservers