A Tale of Two Sieves (1996) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

A Tale of Two Sieves (1996) [pdf]

ams.org

68 pointspera6 comments

I love this paper. For reasons too winding to spell out here, my dad gave me this paper to read when I was in middle school. I was pretty good at math for my age, but not so good that I understood all the math in this paper. (The bit on page 4, "And we have many algorithms from linear algebra that can help us find this dependency" was particularly frustrating as linear algebra was many, many years away for me.) Nevertheless, I was able to build the basics of a factoring program and factor some decently large numbers.

What a testament to the clarity, accessibility, and quality of the writing! This clearly isn't a conference paper or anything, but still very technical.

It wasn't until a decade later when I was doing my undergrad that I learned who Carl Pomerance was, and also who Paul Erdős was, to whom this paper is dedicated. Blew my mind.

he tells you at the beginning of the paper that he developed the quadratic sieve, which doubled the length of the numbers that could be factored and made possible the factoring of rsa-129. to my mind, that's who carl pomerance is? do you have some other salient factor in mind?

>to my mind, that's who carl pomerance is? do you have some other salient factor in mind?

Not the parent poster, but I interpreted what they said as "the gravity of the name didn't hit me until I was older".

As a middle-schooler, the paper was written by some random dude named Carl. That's it. He did some things with a sieve and an algorithm, neat.

Then, later in life, with more experience and context, they gained an understanding and appreciation for the name and what the name implied. As well as how much impact the work had.

At least that is how I read the comment.

Parent poster here. Yup, that’s exactly the sentiment I was going for.

sorry i didn't understand originally! thanks for explaining

For anyone wanting a better image of the "Modern model of the Lehmer Bicycle Chain Sieve" than what is embedded in TFA, it can be seen on page #4 of the Spring 1983 Computer Museum report (which is also a PDF):

https://tcm.computerhistory.org/reports/TCMReportSpring1983....

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