Cryptography, Blockchain, Ethereum, Loopring, Learning.
field with 256 elements would be written as GF(2^8). You can’t have a finite field with 12 elements since you’d have to write it as 2^2 * 3 which breaks the convention of p^m. With our notation of GF(p^m): If m = 1 then we get prime fields If m > 1 then we get extension fields. This is a key point