Irreducibility testing and factorization of polynomials

Abstract

It is shown that under certain hypotheses, irreducibility testing and factorization of polynomials with integer coefficients are polynomial time reducible to primality testing and factorization of integers, respectively. Combined with recently discovered fast primality tests, this yields an almost polynomial time irreducibility algorithm. The assertions of irreducibility produced by this algorithm are always certain and yield short proofs of irreducibility.