With an axe!
Dec. 2nd, 2005 06:00 amWell, it's 6:00 and I've gotten so little done. Normally this time of night is the best for working because there's so little to distract me. Of course, I am in absolutely no mood to write my Hum, so I started trying to write those QB questions. Which is inherently distracting because it involves looking stuff up on the internet in trying to find something to write about. So far I've got all of a single math bonus written. Hooray.
Anyway, seeing as how I'm not getting anything done anyways, I figure I'll explain the whole "with an axe!" thing. This is probably already on my LJ, many months back, but most of you aren't exactly in the habit of going back and reading my old entries.
The reason for this is that it happened some days ago that Sam of Wallace[0] (of math 207) wrote on my Facebook wall, "How do you get P out of R_p? An axe." Where Rp here means Zp, the p-adic integers, and P means pZp. He overheard me saying this to Lucas during class, though he hadn't caught any of my other "with an axe!" comments (though I use the phrase constantly), and apparently thought I came up with it then. (Actually he didn't overhear it, he's not really seated right to, he heard Lucas laughing about it and asked him.)
So I suppose I'd best explain it. I'd just link you to the old entry containing it, if it exists, but really, I don't feel like finding it.
So Dr. Nevard was teaching us an algorithm for factoring polynomials in Zp[x] (where here by Zp I now mean Z mod p). For now we were just talking about squarefree polynomials. So first we gcd it with x^(p^d)-1 (IIRC), for successive d, to split it into polynomials all of whose irreducible factors were of degree d. So, he asks, how do we then split these into those irreducible factors? I suggest, "With an axe!", and, amazingly, he says, "Yes, exactly, with an axe!" and writes, a(x)=...
So since then I've used that phrase as a standard answer for how to do something (especially when it actually makes sense).
-Sniffnoy
[0]I told you I was going to start doing that.
Anyway, seeing as how I'm not getting anything done anyways, I figure I'll explain the whole "with an axe!" thing. This is probably already on my LJ, many months back, but most of you aren't exactly in the habit of going back and reading my old entries.
The reason for this is that it happened some days ago that Sam of Wallace[0] (of math 207) wrote on my Facebook wall, "How do you get P out of R_p? An axe." Where Rp here means Zp, the p-adic integers, and P means pZp. He overheard me saying this to Lucas during class, though he hadn't caught any of my other "with an axe!" comments (though I use the phrase constantly), and apparently thought I came up with it then. (Actually he didn't overhear it, he's not really seated right to, he heard Lucas laughing about it and asked him.)
So I suppose I'd best explain it. I'd just link you to the old entry containing it, if it exists, but really, I don't feel like finding it.
So Dr. Nevard was teaching us an algorithm for factoring polynomials in Zp[x] (where here by Zp I now mean Z mod p). For now we were just talking about squarefree polynomials. So first we gcd it with x^(p^d)-1 (IIRC), for successive d, to split it into polynomials all of whose irreducible factors were of degree d. So, he asks, how do we then split these into those irreducible factors? I suggest, "With an axe!", and, amazingly, he says, "Yes, exactly, with an axe!" and writes, a(x)=...
So since then I've used that phrase as a standard answer for how to do something (especially when it actually makes sense).
-Sniffnoy
[0]I told you I was going to start doing that.
