Lecture

Fermat's Little Theorem

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Description

This lecture covers Fermat's Little Theorem, which states that if N is a prime number, then for any integer A not divisible by N, A^(N-1) is congruent to 1 modulo N. The instructor explains the theorem's contrapositive and extensions, highlighting its applications in determining prime numbers and the probability of a number being prime when satisfying the theorem. Various algorithms, such as the Miller-Rabin primality test, are discussed to efficiently test for primality. The lecture also delves into generating random prime numbers and the importance of prime numbers in cryptography.

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Mathematics

Number theory: Topics in number theory

Related concepts (32)

Fermat primality test

The Fermat primality test is a probabilistic test to determine whether a number is a probable prime. Fermat's little theorem states that if p is prime and a is not divisible by p, then If one wants to test whether p is prime, then we can pick random integers a not divisible by p and see whether the congruence holds. If it does not hold for a value of a, then p is composite. This congruence is unlikely to hold for a random a if p is composite. Therefore, if the equality does hold for one or more values of a, then we say that p is probably prime.

Primality test

A primality test is an algorithm for determining whether an input number is prime. Among other fields of mathematics, it is used for cryptography. Unlike integer factorization, primality tests do not generally give prime factors, only stating whether the input number is prime or not. Factorization is thought to be a computationally difficult problem, whereas primality testing is comparatively easy (its running time is polynomial in the size of the input).

Probability

Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and 1, where, roughly speaking, 0 indicates impossibility of the event and 1 indicates certainty. The higher the probability of an event, the more likely it is that the event will occur. A simple example is the tossing of a fair (unbiased) coin.

Prime number

A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways of writing it as a product, 1 × 5 or 5 × 1, involve 5 itself. However, 4 is composite because it is a product (2 × 2) in which both numbers are smaller than 4.

Fermat's little theorem

Fermat's little theorem states that if p is a prime number, then for any integer a, the number is an integer multiple of p. In the notation of modular arithmetic, this is expressed as For example, if a = 2 and p = 7, then 27 = 128, and 128 − 2 = 126 = 7 × 18 is an integer multiple of 7. If a is not divisible by p, that is if a is coprime to p, Fermat's little theorem is equivalent to the statement that ap − 1 − 1 is an integer multiple of p, or in symbols: For example, if a = 2 and p = 7, then 26 = 64, and 64 − 1 = 63 = 7 × 9 is thus a multiple of 7.

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