Talk:Finite field

I would like to suggest using the GF(q) notation in the article, as it's easy to write GF(pⁿ), but the equivalent with F_q notation cannot be written very satisfactarily in HTML (witness the penultimate paragraph of the article). Would anyone object strongly if I changed the article to use GF(q) notation throughout? --Zundark, 2001 Dec 10

Having written that, I see that F_p^m does display correctly in Netscape. But in IE4 it looks the same as F_pm, which is not good. --Zundark, 2001 Dec 10

In IE 5.5, it displays ok but looks somewhat crappy. It seems to be safer to use the GF notation. --AxelBoldt

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Maybe someone who knows about the subject wouldn't mind reviewing the changes done by 155.198.17.120 to this article. She seems to have subtly vandalised Fascism and started the bogus entry Marxianism. Thanks. --snoyes 15:15 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)

It looks as if she changed "T^3 + T^2 + T + 1 is irreducible" to "T^3 + T^2 + T - 1 is irreducible". Though my algebra is rusty, this seems to be a good and necessary change as (T^3 + T^2 + T + 1) = (T^2+1)(T+1) whereas there are no factors (mod 3) of (T^3 + T^2 + T - 1).

Thanks. Admittedly I didn't bother trying to understand the problem (it is of course fairly easy as you have demonstrated). I just saw a sign change in the tex source and "saw red" ;-) --snoyes 15:59 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)