Fast Integer Multiplication using Modular Arithmetic

Abstract: We give an $O(N\cdot \log N\cdot 2^{O(\log^*N)})$ algorithm for multiplying two $N$-bit integers that improves the $O(N\cdot \log N\cdot \log\log N)$ algorithm by Sch\"{o}nhage-Strassen. Both these algorithms use modular arithmetic. Recently, F\"{u}rer gave an $O(N\cdot \log N\cdot 2^{O(\log^*N)})$ algorithm which however uses arithmetic over complex numbers as opposed to modular arithmetic. In this paper, we use multivariate polynomial multiplication along with ideas from F\"{u}rer's algorithm to achieve this improvement in the modular setting. Our algorithm can also be viewed as a $p$-adic version of F\"{u}rer's algorithm. Thus, we show that the two seemingly different approaches to integer multiplication, modular and complex arithmetic, are similar.