6.5-6.7 & 7.1, due on October 24

The Interesting

I think it's crazy that the time it takes to factor primes has gotten faster; technology and our factorization methods just improve! Also, I never would have guessed to try the words "squemish ossifage" so they definitely picked correctly. I think the idea of a trapdoor is really cool, and it's good that a requirement of it is that it's easy to do. 

The Challenging

I am so excited to be working with Discrete Logarithms because I've tried to work with them in the past on homework and didn't know how. I don't really understand how we're just supposed to know that 2^6 = 2^16 = 1^26 = 9 mod 11 (= is congruence....).

Also, I don't understand why it matters if alpha is a primitive root.