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Reflection Paper On Calculus

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Calculus has always seemed to be a daunting task for high school students. I feel that it is a mental block that has been developed in our minds due to the initial challenges it throws at us. Since A-form, I have had an immense passion for this branch of mathematics. During summer holidays, I took Calculus lessons to enhance my graphical understanding of complex equations. Therefore, I would like to discuss an intriguing topic of Calculus to generate interest amongst that segment of my batch that has aversion towards Calculus. My topic is to study few fascinating algebraic and geometric properties of elliptical curves and its application in fields such as Cryptography.
As students of mathematics, we have studied Conic Sections which mainly …show more content…

For example: if we want to find a tangent to an elliptical curve y^2=x^3+ax+b . Then we differentiate the equation with respect to x we obtain the slope at that point and using the equation y=mx+c we obtain the equation of tangent at a particular point.
Finding the tangents to curve and area of a curve were the driving questions which motivated mathematicians in the 18th century to lay the foundations of calculus. Interestingly, the Greeks had already calculated the area of an ellipse by approximations. They constructed polygons, one inside and one around the ellipse which roughly were equivalent to the area of the ellipse.
In today’s cyber oriented world, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is gaining widespread application. Recently, it was also misused by NSA for violating the IT security policies. Interestingly, we have already studied the basics in order to study this topic …show more content…

For every value of x, it is assumed that it is impossible to find discrete logarithm of a random elliptic curve element. This assumption is also known as “elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem”. Discrete logarithm can be best understood through modular exponentiation. Though this term may sound pompous, I assure you it is not the case. In modular arithmetic, number theorists study the behavior of numbers on division with other numbers. Consider the number 13, on division with 8 it yields the remainder 5. In modular arithmentic this can be written

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