ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Dickson polynomials

Okay kiddo, have you ever played with a toy train that goes around a track? Well, imagine you have a really long train with lots of cars and you want to know how fast it's going. But you can't just look at the whole train, it's too complicated. So instead, you look at individual cars and how fast they're going. And by adding up all the speeds of the individual cars, you can figure out how fast the whole train is going.

Now let's talk about math. Sometimes we have really complicated math problems that are hard to solve by just looking at the whole thing. So instead, we break it down into smaller parts and solve those parts. That's where dickson polynomials come in. These polynomials are like individual cars on a train.

Just like you add up the speeds of individual cars to figure out the speed of the whole train, we can add up the results of different dickson polynomials to get the answer to a more complicated math problem.

But how do we make these dickson polynomials? Well, we start with a really simple one, like x (which is just one little car on the train). And then we keep adding more and more complicated ones by multiplying the previous one by x and subtracting a number. It's kind of like adding more and more cars to your train, making it longer and harder to figure out the speed of the whole thing.

But why do we care about these dickson polynomials? Well, they come up in all kinds of different math problems, like cryptography, which is like secret codes that people use to keep their messages safe. By using dickson polynomials, we can make these codes stronger and harder to crack.

So there you go, kiddo. Dickson polynomials are like individual cars on a train that we add up to solve more complicated math problems, and they're important for keeping secret codes safe.