It seems my memory of it was traumatizing, one of the few assignments I had where I remember where I sat in the library computing this assignment on paper. Without electronic assistance.
To a lot of people, this will sound like
"Monads are just monoids in the category of endofunctors"
Basically, every high school student knows what prime numbers are, what factors are, what exponentiation is, what modulo (remainder) is. A scientific calculator will have all the functions for you to do RSA encryption by hand with small primes.
You need more math courses to understand what it means to multiply a point by a scalar along a curve.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/a-rel...
>A more interesting property is that any non-vertical line will intersect the curve in at most three places.
If this is correct, that means a line could intersect at 1,2, or 3 places.
>Let's imagine this curve as the setting for a bizarre game of billiards. Take any two points on the curve and draw a line through them; the line will intersect the curve at exactly one more place.
No that is not correct. I can already see two points where a horizontal line would only intersect 2 points and not intersect another. Basically, you can draw a line tangent to the curve on the left and intersect only 2 points instead of three.
These geometric explanations strike me as simplifications, and as I imagine what it would look like in code, I get the feeling that there would be all sorts of special cases, boundary conditions, and asymptotes.
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Basically, every first year computer science student who has taken discrete math can write a (horribly broken, ineffecient) implementation of RSA encryption and decryption and have a pretty good intuitive understanding of what is going on.
In fact, I did that just for fun as a first year CS student.
With elliptical curves, I have read through the multiple websites and explanations and over several years and still feel I do not have an intuitive grasp of what is really going on.