2006-10-29

barnabas_truman: (math)
2006-10-29 08:40 pm

USDA Certified Prime Factorization

A few years ago I wrote a simple TI-BASIC program to factor whole numbers. Input a whole number, and it outputs all possible pairs of factors of that number. It was slow but it worked.

Fast-forward to half an hour ago. At some point in the intervening time I had lost and/or deleted the program, so I decided to write it again, because I had been reading an interesting article about prime numbers and factorization. While programming, I decided to tweak it a bit to speed up the process, and in doing so I realized that with just a minor adjustment, I could make it instead output a complete prime factorization of the original input.

In summary--I now have a lovely li'l graphing calculator program I wrote myself that will prime-factor any whole number, and I want to show off. Gimme some numbers to factor!