NT Part 1:GCD, LCM, Euclidean Algorithm

The definitions of GCD and LCM are well-known, (and taught in middle school I think) I will skip the definitions.

Also, since $\text{lcm} (a,b) \cdot \text{gcd} (a,b) = ab$ , calculating GCD is equivalent to calculating LCM.
Now, how do we calculate the GCD of two numbers?

A naive solution would be iterating over all positive integers no more than $\text{min} (a,b)$ .
This will get the GCD in $O(\text{min}(a,b))$ , very very slow.

We can calculate the GCD of $a,b$ in $O(\log ab)$ using Euclidean Algorithm.
This algorithm uses the easy-to-prove fact $\text{gcd}(a,b) = \text{gcd} (b, r)$ , where $r$ is the remainder when $a$ is divided by $b$ , or just a%b.

We can now use the following code.

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int gcd(int u, int v)
{
    return u%v==0?v:gcd(v,u%v);
}
int main(void)
{
    int x, y;
    cin>>x>>y;
    cout<<gcd(x,y);
}

How do we prove that this algorithm is $O(\log ab)$ ? Well, let's suppose that we started with $(a,b)$ .
Then, we go to $(b,r)$ , where $r$ is defined similarly as above. It can be proved that $br < \frac{1}{2}ab$ .
Therefore, the product of two numbers in the function decreases by half every time. Done!

Here's a challenge. Can we find the numbers $x, y$ such that $ux+vy=\text{gcd} (u,v)$ ?
There exists infinitely many pairs - this is Bezout's Lemma. The algorithm to generate such pairs is called Extended Euclidean Algorithm.

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