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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

If you'd like to hear someone who can barely do long division† discuss this vulnerability with one of the leading isogeny cryptographer researchers and the world's most isogeny-enthusiastic cryptography engineer, have I got a podcast for you:

https://securitycryptographywhatever.buzzsprout.com/1822302/...

There's even a transcript, if you want to read things like:

So I watched the, uh, I watched Costello's tutorial, like the, the broadcast he did for, um, for Microsoft. And I kind of worked my way through the, the tutorial paper. So like, is it, is it true that like, in sort of the same sense we're...

† Looks back and forth around the room furtively

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Just listened to that episode yesterday - it was great thanks! Listening to Deirdre's description of how it got ported to Sage and accelerated in short order - so she could break it in a few minutes on her laptop - in Python, totally reminded me of the line from Iron Man.

"Tony Stark Was Able To Build This In A Cave! With A Box Of Scraps!"

Just FYI, your 1038.pdf hyperlink at the bottom goes to the 975.pdf paper ;).

Huh? Long division is easy. I just type the numbers into google

Can anyone do long division other than children and those who pursue math academically? Seems impossible to imagine.

You need to be able to perform long division to take quotients in algebraic structures, e.g. polynomials. Yes, Wolfram Alpha can probably do it, but not always.

shudders with memories of abstract algebra

It's easier with polynomials than with numbers, though.

But numbers are polynomials!

Both in the trivial sense, and the 361 = 3x10^2 + 6x10 + 1 sense

You don't need to understand long division to be able to do that. Long division is over the integers. It's got a weird notation, and I never learnt it.

There isn't any reason for 99.9% of mathematicians - even in abstract algebra - to know long division.

I guess a few advanced software developers may also be able to apply such a complex algorithm to a couple of integers.

Only a few. The most talented, to be sure.

It's much easier in base 2 than in base 10. Similar to the multiplication tables, the table for base 2 is just the 2x2 matrix at the top left corner of the 10x10 times tables.

Do people that purse math use long division that much?

Well I have a Math BA and I can say that I haven’t done much long division by hand in the past few years but I sure know how to do it.

After looking it up on Wikipedia and seeing the various notations used (most of which are awful IMO) I get the hate on long division, though I never felt anything like that. It may be because it is familiar to me, but the notation I learned in school in Austria feels superior or at least less irritating. I guess German schools use the same. Why the heck write the divisor first?

As a kid who chronically forgot to bring her calculator to school for about 12 years straight, I can now do long division well enough that I sometimes do it rather than get up to fetch my phone from the other room. It's also how I do division in my head.

I did pursue mathematics academically but I don't know if it ever came up in university math; more so in physics and computer science.

EDIT: apparently what I do is "short division", which is just long division but you don't write down all the steps.

This is news to me that people can't/don't do long division. It's simple. I use it regularly to estimate quotients--just run the process to a couple places in your head.

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