The dispatch
Thomas Flake

Never paywalled

Research

The scholarship under the fiction. All of it free, permanently.

The digital twin

Dissertation

Essays

Factor a number

The dissertation's claim was tractability — that factoring was more tractable than people supposed, because a precomputed library of primes converts an arithmetic problem into a storage problem, and storage gets cheaper on a schedule.

A working piece of that argument is open to anyone: type a number and watch it come apart against a verified library of consecutive primes. It will also tell you which prime each factor is, counting from 2 — and, if you ask, do the whole job the slow honest way so you can see what precomputation actually costs.

Open the factoring demonstrator →