Suppose that we wish to determine the factorisation of a prime ideal P of OK into primes of OL. The following procedure (Neukirch, p. 47) solves this problem in many cases. The strategy is to select an integer θ in OL so that L is generated over K by θ (such a θ is guaranteed to exist by the primitive element theorem), and then to examine the minimal polynomial H(X) of θ over K; it is a monic polynomial with coefficients in OK. Reducing the coefficients of H(X) modulo P, we obtain a monic polynomial h(X) with coefficients in F, the (finite) residue field OK/P. Suppose that h(X) factorises in the polynomial ring F[X] as
