Fürer's algorithm

Fürer's algorithm is an integer multiplication algorithm for very large numbers possessing a very low asymptotic complexity. It was created in 2007 by Swiss mathematician Martin Fürer of Pennsylvania State University^[1] as an asymptotically faster (when analysed on a multitape Turing machine) algorithm than its predecessor, the Schönhage–Strassen algorithm published in 1971.^[2]

The predecessor to the Fürer algorithm, the Schönhage–Strassen algorithm, used fast Fourier transforms to compute integer products in time $O(n \log n \log \log n)$ (in big O notation) and its authors, Arnold Schönhage and Volker Strassen, also conjectured a lower bound for the problem of $\Omega(n \log n)$. Here, $n$ denotes the total number of bits in the two input numbers. Fürer's algorithm reduces the gap between these two bounds: it can be used to multiply binary integers of length $n$ in time $n \log n\,2^{O(\log^* n)}$ (or by a circuit with that many logic gates), where log*n represents the iterated logarithm operation. However, the difference between the $\log \log n$ and $2^{\log^* n}$ factors in the time bounds of the Schönhage–Strassen algorithm and the Fürer algorithm for realistic values of $n$ is very small.^[1]

In 2008, Anindya De, Chandan Saha, Piyush Kurur and Ramprasad Saptharishi^[3] gave a similar algorithm that relies on modular arithmetic instead of complex arithmetic to achieve the same running time.

In 2014, David Harvey, Joris van der Hoeven, and Grégoire Lecerf^[4] showed that an optimized version of Fürer's algorithm achieves a running time of $O(n\log n2^{4\log^* n})$, making the implied constant in the $O(\log^* n)$ exponent explicit. They also gave a modification to Fürer's algorithm that achieves $O(n\log n2^{3\log^* n})$

In 2015 Svyatoslav Covanov and Emmanuel Thomé provided another modification that achieves the same running time.^[5] Yet it remains just as impractical as the other implementations of Fürer's algorithm.

See also

• Number-theoretic transform

References

1. Fürer, M. (2007). "Faster Integer Multiplication" in Proceedings of the thirty-ninth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing, June 11–13, 2007, San Diego, California, USA
2. A. Schönhage and V. Strassen, "Schnelle Multiplikation großer Zahlen", Computing 7 (1971), pp. 281–292.
3. Anindya De, Piyush P Kurur, Chandan Saha, Ramprasad Saptharishi. Fast Integer Multiplication Using Modular Arithmetic. Symposium on Theory of Computation (STOC) 2008. arXiv:0801.1416
4. David Harvey, Joris van der Hoeven, and Grégoire Lecerf, "Even faster integer multiplication", 2014, arXiv:1407.3360
5. Svyatoslav Covanov and Emmanuel Thomé, "Fast arithmetic for faster integer multiplication", 2015 arXiv:1502.02800