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by renyicircle 16 days ago
The article doesn't really tell us much about the "why" unfortunately. Diophantine equations are introduced but all the interesting stuff is promised in future articles which haven't come yet. All the reader can take from this is that these equations lead to some "profound hidden structures" without a good idea what they are.

I get that it's hard to wrap one's head around the Langlands program but I'd love to see at least more exposition on the following statement:

>inventing the Euclidean algorithm is essentially equivalent to inventing unique prime factorization

1 comments

Don’t think that has anything to do with langlands..? Euclidean algorithm is literally just an explicit algorithm for prime factorisation
I mentioned Langlands because it's one of the cool things related to Diophantine equations that the article mentions but I wouldn't expect it to be covered there. The connection between the Euclidean algorithm and unique prime factorization is simpler but also not obvious (the Euclidean algorithm on the surface just computes the GCD of two numbers and doesn't mention primes) so it would make sense to explain it in the article. However, they don't explain what the algorithm is, maybe assuming that the reader knows about it, while the rest of the article seemingly assumes no familiarity with basic number theory concepts like modular arithmetic. That confused me.