Sec 1.8 Due Sept 19
Difficult:
One part of the reading that found difficult to grasp until the very end was how the GCD could be a linear combination of the numbers that it divides. It was only after the final example that I understood what they meant when they said it was the minimum value d for d = ax + by. It would be good to see an example that clarifies that early on in class.
Reflective: It's pretty amazing that we have a simple algorithm over 2000 years old that finds the GCD of 2 numbers remarkably quickly, without factoring, and yet we still don't have an algorithm that finds the factors of a number quickly.
One part of the reading that found difficult to grasp until the very end was how the GCD could be a linear combination of the numbers that it divides. It was only after the final example that I understood what they meant when they said it was the minimum value d for d = ax + by. It would be good to see an example that clarifies that early on in class.
Reflective: It's pretty amazing that we have a simple algorithm over 2000 years old that finds the GCD of 2 numbers remarkably quickly, without factoring, and yet we still don't have an algorithm that finds the factors of a number quickly.
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