Messages

15/1: The exam results: A - 11, B - 10, C - 10, D - 11, E - 6, F - 3.

Some comments on the different problems:

• 1 A few people tried to be clever instead of using exhaustive search. However, sometimes exhaustive search is the right thing to do. This is one of those cases; being clever probably took longer than doing an exhaustive search. (Clever or not, the grades are the same.)
• 2b As usual, many people insist on annoying me by doing exponent arithmetic modulo 47 instead of 46.
• 4a Several people read the problem as asking for rows whose coordinates added up to zero modulo 2. Tsk, tsk. Also, some people found columns, not rows.
• 5 A lot of people wanted the given map on pairs of field elements to be a group homomorphism, because CRT gives us a ring isomorphism. This is (sort of) what we are trying to prove in this problem, so it cannot simply be assumed. (It is true because of the algebraic nature of the elliptic curve addition.)

15/12: Today's exam with suggested solutions.

6/12: I have prepared a pdf file of all the lecture notes that should be easier to print.

Visiting hours before the exam: Wed 12/12 9-12 and 13-15, Thu 13/12 13-15 and Fri 14/12 9-12 and 13-15.

Good luck on the exam!

19/11: The solutions of the exercises have been published, see Exercises. Questions regarding the solutions should be sent to Herman.

30/8: The first exercise set is ready.

19/8: As there will be no lectures next week, this is a good time to review a few topics that we will need:

• How to compute the greatest common divisor and modular inverses.
• What is a cyclic group?
• Linear algebra algorithms, in particular, given a set of vectors that are linearly dependent, how to find a linear combination of those vectors that sum to zero.

30/7: The first lecture will be Tuesday August 28. There will be no lectures in Week 34.