(Difficult)
The most difficult part of the lecture for me was in Chapter 1, on page 8. Here the author was talking about measuring the size of numbers, comparing the magnitude of a number and the number of digits in the number. The wording in this section is hard to follow for me. Specifically the phrase "An algorithm that runs in time a power of log n is much more desirable than one that runs in time a power of n." I was able to eventually grasp the rest of the paragraph, but this particular phrase is still confusing to me.
(Reflective)
In reading chapter three I was most interested in the division in modular arithmetic, and the use of a multiplicative inverse for division. In past classes, when dealing with modular arithmetic, we never touched on modular division. Most classes simply teach that you can't do it, or it only works in certain cases, and therefore we won't bother with it. It was nice to finally learn when it was applicable, that being when the modulo and the divisor are relatively prime.
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