Public-key Cryptography: Theory and Practice

**2.14. p-adic Numbers

Let us now study a different area of algebraic number theory, introduced by Kurt Hensel in an attempt to apply power series expansions in connection with numbers. While trying to explain the properties of (rational) integers mathematicians started embedding in bigger and bigger structures, richer and richer in properties. came in a natural attempt to form quotients, and for some time people believed that that is all about reality. Pythagoras was seemingly the first to locate and prove the irrationality of a number, namely, ...