Can we (with just paper and math) find the prime number "p" of an RSA key? With all our tools in math, isn't it really possible to find the prime number p of an RSA key without brute-forcing it with a computer? I'm not talking about doing it in 2 minutes but doing it in a clever way that is faster than our computers. Some algorithms work really well like MSIEVE and GGNFS, but it takes too much time to proceed. Can't we really find the prime p without the help of an algorithm?
If there was a general strategy to do this with pen and paper, we could do it with a computer just as well. Most pen and paper solutions to any math exercise rely on using lots of “shortcuts” or “tricks” that exploit special situations or specific properties of the numbers in the problem. However, since RSA keys tend to be very big, we'd need an impossible number of special situations to have an approach that works generally.