Week 3, Thursday 3.11

Could you explain the the discrete log problem? This chapter reminded me of basic linear algebra and the definition of a field and the lemmas it satisfies. It was interesting applying them to fields mod p. Moreover it was nice to finally understand why we were using mod a prime rather than any other integer. The polynomial fields were familiar to me but the method of using the extended eucleidian algorithim to find inverses of polynomials was quite interesting. Could you please go into more detail about how 8-byte data can represent a polynomial? That seems odd and much of the explanation after is vague if you don't understand the initial steps. LFSR seems really cool especially finding the period of reocuurance. I followed much of the explanation but I have not learned Lagrange's theorem yet. It would be nice if there was another example, it would really make things a lot clearer.