Re: which schools research factoring?


galathaea wrote:
On Aug 30, 6:03 pm, ToddSmith <ellipt...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,
I just got my Master's degree at an applied-leaning school and I want
to research the problem of factoring large integers somewhere else for
a PhD. Which school are doing the most research in factoring these
days?

while hendrik is over at berkeley

Nope. He left. He is back in the Netherlands full time.

The difficulty with "researching factoring" is that it is not
really a problem in which a dedicated effort will lead to results.
A new factoring algorithm seemingly requires a new piece of
inspiration. It is impossible to predict when such a thing will
occur.

Of course one can find incremental improvements to existing
algorithms (I just published one such paper and am working on
extending it; I gave a rump talk at Crypto), but it seems unlikely
that this type of thing would be accepted as a PhD thesis.
OTOH, Peter's thesis was on applying FFT techniques to ECM,
so it can be done.

If you really want to do this sort of thing, you should look
at CWI and Lausanne. You should also seek out Franke and
Kleinjung. While the TOC group at MIT is quite good,
this is not really their domain. And (AFAIK) people at Waterloo
are not really pursuing it either.

If you want to do this sort of thing, you really need a general PhD
in
number theory to go along with it.

.