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Summer of Math Exposition

The Prime Number Imposters

Audience: high-schoolundergraduategraduate

Tags: numberscryptography

A lighthearted yet in depth examination of pseudoprimes, and the modular arithmetic underlying primality. The target audience is anyone who loves numbers!



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7.5 Overall score*
11 Rank
17 Votes
8 Comments

Comments

7.1

Yes, good visuals. But video of 40 minutes is a bit too long for me.

7.5

This was well paced. I think I would have preferred a definition of “field” to reinforce its importance (and maybe with reference to Galois) but overall this was a good introduction to primality testing.

7

Very interesting video! I learned some new and delightful things about number theory.

I understand why you got into modular arithmetic so soon, but I think you should have given a sneak preview of a primality test that involves that before diving into it. I can imagine someone getting confused about why this video about impostor primes is suddenly talking about modular exponentiation.

I didn’t know the totient function was multiplicative, so thank you for that. I might have avoided using the term “coprime” right before introducing the totient function, since the more jargon you introduce the more likely you are to overwhelm people. Maybe consider spacing out definitions in the future to give the audience time to digest every new term. Referring to the totient function aloud as “phi of n” may also be confusing to viewers struggling to keep up.

It’s unfortunate that the matplotlib labels collide with each other on the sus plot around 18:10.

I’m surprised this video doesn’t cover any sieve methods for finding primes, even just to say they are space inefficient.

8.6

The beginner can. They even provided a runthrough and code!

8.2

Incredibly solid video, and very thorough. The progression through the primality tests felt like a journey

7

This is a really nice job of reviewing a lot of number theoretic ideas and getting to primality testing. I would share this with college level students who wanted to know more from their number theory or abstract algebra classes.

8

Really well done video. The motivation is made clear very early. And we are walked through each step of our journey with clarity and ample examples. And the varoius applications in the world at the end was nice.

8.1

loved it. simple graphics actually wokred well for thsi. The video is a bit long though.