In: Advanced Math
6. Find all monic irreducible polynomials of degree ≤ 3 over Z3. Using your list, write each of the following polynomials as a product of irreducible polynomials over Z3:
(a) x^4 + 2x^2 + 2x + 2.
(b) 2x^3 − 2x + 1.
(c) x^4 + 1.
We are to enumerate all the irreducible monic polynomials with
degree over the field
. First
observe that if any polynomial of degree less than
is reducible, it
must have a degree one factor, thus in particular the polynomial
must have a root over the field. Hence an easy way to check for
irreducibility is to check whether we have a root or not.
Degree 1 Polynomials
These are easy to write down. We have 3 possibilities. Namely,
Degree 2 Polynomials
Any degree 2 monic polynomial looks like
. Since it cannot have
as a root, we must have
that
. Thus we need
to put
and check whether we have any roots. We have 6 polynomials to
check for. An easy calculation gives the following list of
irriducible polynomials.
Degree 3 Polynomials
The strategy is same as before. We have any monic degree 3
polynomial looks like .
Since 0 cannot be a root, we must have
. Thus we need
to put the values
and check for root. There are 18 polynomials to check for! Another
easy (albeit lengthy) calculation gives the following list of
irreducible polynomials.
Lastly we need to factorize the given polynomials.
Part (a)
Given
. We check,
, since we are working over
. Thus
2 is a root and we find out,
. But we again see that 2 is a root of the second factor and hence
we further factorize,
. These are the irreducible factors.
Part (b)
Given,
. We see that this polynomial has no roots over the field. Thus it
must be a scalar multiple of some degree 3 irreducible polynomial.
Since
over
we
see,
, which is the irreducible factorization.
Part(c)
Given,
. Again we have that this polynomial has no roots over the field.
Then either it is irreducible itself or product of two degree 2
irreducible polynomials. Since there are only 3 such polynomials,
as listed above, we can simply check their products. We can then
see that,
, which is the irreducible factorization.