[tptacek]

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

[thadt]

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!"

[KenoFischer]

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

[googlryas]

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

[staticassertion]

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

[scatters]

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.

[foota]

shudders with memories of abstract algebra

[ogogmad]

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.

[omnicognate]

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

[sdenton4]

But numbers are polynomials!

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

[taejo]

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.

[zwirbl]

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?

[incompatible]

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

[bitexploder]

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

[hodgesrm]

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.

[daniel-cussen]

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.

[Ygg2]

Do people that purse math use long division that much?

[expensive_news]

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.