It seems to me that I need to factor numbers more often than most people do. I can’t even attribute this to my being a mathematician, since I don’t think along the lines of anything like mathematical work; I just find that I need to know, say, that 272,250 is what you get by multiplying 2 and 3 to the second power and 5 to the third power and 11 to the second power. And I reliably go to places I know will do calculations quickly, like the desktop Calculator application or what you get from typing mathematical expressions into Google, and find that since the last time I looked they still haven’t added a factorization tool. I have tools I can use, particularly Matlab or its open-source work-just-enough-alike-to-make-swapping-code-difficult replica Octave, which takes a long time to start up for one lousy number.
So I got to thinking: I’ve wanted to learn a bit about writing apps, and surely, writing a factorization app is both easy and quick and would prove I could write something. The routine is easy, too: take a number (272,250) as input; then divide by two as many times as you can (just one, giving 136,125), then divide by three as many times as you can (twice, giving 15,125), then by five as many times as you can (three times, reaching 121), then by seven (you can’t), then eleven (twice, reaching 1), until you’ve run the whole number down. You just need to divide repeatedly by the prime numbers, starting at two, and going up only to the square root of whatever your input number is.
Without bothering to program, then, I thought about how I could make this a more efficient routine. Figuring out more efficient ways to code is good practice, because if you think long enough about how to code efficiently, you can feel satisfied that you would have written a very good program and never bother to actually do it, which would only spoil the beauty of the code anyway. Here’s where the possible inefficiency sets in: how do you know what all the prime numbers up to the square root of whatever you’re interested in is?
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