Maudlin ruminations of a mind bit by wanderlust.

I found this awesome site, which has a number of cool number theoretic projects such as the ECM Factorization Algorithm. The only problem is, the source code for the applet is in java, something I'm not prepared to grapple with yet. If anyone has any expertise with Java Applets, can they please go through it (no mean task), and tell me what the general algorithm is, without the applet part.

There's only one problem - It's 9522 lines long :|

In the meantime, I've been working on a python module for mathematical functions that are a bit higher than the standard library. They're not very fast, as they're written in python, but I'm trying to optimize them as much as possible. One upset I found was that the traditional python idiom for adding large strings : ''.join(huge_list) vs string += string : Is actually losing relevance. Of course I didn't test every possible contingency, but for smaller strings, string addition is faster, while for larger strings, the join idiom is faster.

I also found that most linux distributions come with a console command factor, which outputs the prime factors of a given number. Although it's pretty fast, its algorithm is still fairly primitive.

I'll put my math module (which I've tentatively called imath ) up when I've completed a decent amount of it. It's coming out quite well, actually.

Now, back to 9522 lines of java... :|