If each battalion in the Pacific employed a pair of Native Americans as radio operators, secure communication could be guaranteed. This would be much simpler than a mechanical encryption device and mu...
In June 1991 he took the drastic step of asking a friend to post PGP on a Usenet bulletin board. PGP is just a piece of software, and so from the bulletin board it could be downloaded by anyone for fr...
It has been said that the First World War was the chemists’ war, because mustard gas and chlorine were employed for the first time, and that the Second World War was the physicists’ war, because the a...
Major General Howard Conner, without the Navajos, the marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.
Number theorists consider prime numbers to be the most important numbers of all because they are the atoms of mathematics. Prime numbers are the numerical building blocks because all other numbers can...
One way to solve an encrypted message, if we know its language, is to find a different plaintext of the same language long enough to fill one sheet or so, and then we count the occurrences of each let...
Previous experience, however, tells us that every so-called unbreakable cipher has, sooner or later, succumbed to cryptanalysis
The Last Theorem is at the heart of an intriguing saga of courage, skulduggery, cunning, and tragedy, involving all the greatest heroes of mathematics.
The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is n...
There exists no purer concentration of Americanism than among the First Americans. The Navajos were so eager to fight that some of them lied about their age, or gorged themselves on bunches of bananas...
A Navajo verb is conjugated not solely according to its subject, but also according to its object. The verb ending depends on which category the object belongs to: long (e.g., pipe, pencil), slender a...
Baseball is a game played by the dexterous, but only understood by the Poindexterous.9
Destitute.
If a message protected by quantum cryptography were ever to be deciphered, it would mean that quantum theory is flawed,
Quantum cryptography is a system that ensures the security of a message by making it hard for Eve to read accurately a communication between Alice and Bob. Furthermore, if Eve tries to eavesdrop then...
Que π
The Third World War would be the mathematicians’ war, because mathematicians will have control over the next great weapon of war—information. Mathematicians have been responsible for developing the co...
The Vigenère cipher belongs to a class known as polyalphabetic, because it employs several cipher alphabets per message. The polyalphabetic nature of the Vigenère cipher is what gives it its strength,...
Babbage’s successful cryptanalysis of the Vigenère cipher was probably achieved in 1854, soon after his spat with Thwaites, but his discovery went completely unrecognized because he never published it...
Maths is one of the purest forms of thought, and to outsiders mathematicians may seem almost other-worldly.
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