Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Mathematics/2013 September 22

Mathematics desk
< September 21 << Aug | September | Oct >> September 23 >
Welcome to the Wikipedia Mathematics Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.


September 22 edit

Tonelli-Shanks extensions edit

How can the algorithm be extended to, for example, x^2 - x == n (mod p)? Or to any polynomial function of x? 68.0.144.214 (talk) 00:40, 22 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You can solve the quadratic equation in the usual way, division mod p is well defined, and when you have to take the square root, you have available the Tonelli-Shanks algorithm. Count Iblis (talk) 01:33, 22 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm just starting to learn about this, and I see that the rank of a conjugate partition is the negative of the original rank, so in particlar, the rank of a selfconjugate partition is zero, and the selfconjugates are a subset of rank zero partitions, so i figured this skew-symmetry or odd-functionness with respect to conjugates would be important. But the crank doesn't have this property at all. Is there a way of tweaking the crank function to make it skew-symmetric? Thanks, Rich Peterson64.134.220.186 (talk) 20:27, 22 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]