Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Factorization of polynomials
Summary
In mathematics and computer algebra, factorization of polynomials or polynomial factorization expresses a polynomial with coefficients in a given field or in the integers as the product of irreducible factors with coefficients in the same domain. Polynomial factorization is one of the fundamental components of computer algebra systems.
The first polynomial factorization algorithm was published by Theodor von Schubert in 1793. Leopold Kronecker rediscovered Schubert's algorithm in 1882 and extended it to multivariate polynomials and coefficients in an algebraic extension. But most of the knowledge on this topic is not older than circa 1965 and the first computer algebra systems:
When the long-known finite step algorithms were first put on computers, they turned out to be highly inefficient. The fact that almost any uni- or multivariate polynomial of degree up to 100 and with coefficients of a moderate size (up to 100 bits) can be factored by modern algorithms in a few minutes of computer time indicates how successfully this problem has been attacked during the past fifteen years. (Erich Kaltofen, 1982)
Nowadays, modern algorithms and computers can quickly factor univariate polynomials of degree more than 1000 having coefficients with thousands of digits. For this purpose, even for factoring over the rational numbers and number fields, a fundamental step is a factorization of a polynomial over a finite field.
Polynomial rings over the integers or over a field are unique factorization domains. This means that every element of these rings is a product of a constant and a product of irreducible polynomials (those that are not the product of two non-constant polynomials). Moreover, this decomposition is unique up to multiplication of the factors by invertible constants.
Factorization depends on the base field. For example, the fundamental theorem of algebra, which states that every polynomial with complex coefficients has complex roots, implies that a polynomial with integer coefficients can be factored (with root-finding algorithms) into linear factors over the complex field C.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Ontological neighbourhood