Review3 of Primality Testing in Polynomial Time by Martin Dietzfelbinger Springer-Verlag, 2004, 147 pp., $34.95 Reviewed by Jonathan Katz Dept. of Computer Science, University of Maryland In August, 2002 Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal, and Nitin Saxena posted an astonishing paper on the Web with the simple title: Primes is in P . The AKS paper was astonishing not only because it resolved a widely-studied question that had been open for roughly 30 years (or 200 years, or 2000 years, depending on how one chooses to count such things), but also because the techniques used in the paper were almost completely elementary, relying almost entirely on standard undergraduate algebra. The paper caused quite a stir within the computer science community, and within days (even hours!) of its posting numerous researchers had already veri ed the proof, given seminars on the result, and suggested improvements and simpli cations (to the point where the proof now relies entirely on undergraduate algebra alone). Due to its fundamental nature, its accessibility, and its relevance to a wide range of disciplines, it is fair to say that the paper is probably the most widely read paper in theoretical computer science of the past
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