I told Ron to take my name off the paper, recalls Adleman. I told him that it was his invention, not mine. But Ron refused and we got into a discussion about it.
I had written this paper on pancake numbers with help from my adviser, Manuel Blum, who's a well-known computer scientist, and we submitted it to a journal called . I subsequently left graduate school...
I am a liar!
Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. ‘Immortality’ may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of w...
Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.
Alan Turing was another cryptanalyst who did not live long enough to receive any public recognition. Instead of being acclaimed a hero, he was persecuted for his homosexuality. In 1952, while reportin...
The greatest tribute to the work of the Navajo is the simple fact that their code is one of very few throughout history that was never broken.
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,...
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...
It can be mathematically proved that it is impossible for a cryptanalyst to crack a message encrypted with a onetime pad cipher. In other words, the onetime pad cipher is not merely believed to be unb...
If a message protected by quantum cryptography were ever to be deciphered, it would mean that quantum theory is flawed,
Baseball is a game played by the dexterous, but only understood by the Poindexterous.9
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...
Vigenère’s work culminated in his Traicté des Chiffres (A Treatise on Secret Writing), published in 1586. Ironically, this was the same year that Thomas Phelippes was breaking the cipher of Mary Queen...
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...
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...
The first known European book to describe the use of cryptography was written in the thirteenth century by the English Franciscan monk and polymath Roger Bacon. Epistle on the Secret Works of Art and...
The Last Theorem is at the heart of an intriguing saga of courage, skulduggery, cunning, and tragedy, involving all the greatest heroes of mathematics.
Stát, který věří, že není správné číst cizí dopisy, časem začne věřit i tomu, že jeho korespondenci také nikdo nečte...
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...