Benjamin Lundell

Integer Factorization

For at least the last 2000 years, mathematicians have been studying prime numbers: numbers that are divisible only by one and themselves. Part of our fascination with these numbers comes from the fact that they are a sort of mathematical building block. It has long been known that any whole number can be written as a product of prime numbers, but surprisingly, we still do not know a good way to start with a number and find all of its prime factors! In this lecture, we will discuss prime numbers and a variety of methods for finding prime factorization of integers. There will be many examples and ample opportunity to try out each new method we discover.