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The pulse of the world

“Bhoogolathinte spandanam Mathematics aanu.”(Mathematics in the pulse of earth) – The gruff voice of the one-n-only inimitable Thilakan still rings in my ears. In ‘Sphadikam’, it is told in a sarcastic way as though to tell us that the father’s insistence on son learning Math wrecked his(the son’s, I mean) life.(wrecked? Umm.. for all you know, there might be folks who want to emulate aadu thoma!)

Why math all of a sudden? Had done a project which dealt with encryption a couple of months back and got hooked on to cryptography. Got around reading some books too. Nothing heavy. Some light yet stimulating reads.
“In Code – A mathematical Journey” by Sarah Flannery
“The code book” by Simon Singh..
More about them later..
N was telling about how interesting he found “Gödel, Escher, Bach” to be. Read the first chapter. Too good. Yet another must read.

Back to cryptography, it is strange.. how one gets interested in some subject. How something catches one’s fancy for no reason. I got into its fold when I came across RSA.

“RSA and SN were his closest pals in college. RSA was someone who was everyone’s favourite. Talked less but well, was good at games – be it cricket, football or basketball, best at organizing – be it class tour or department fest or a technical symposuim, seemed to have answers to everyone’s problems, guys who couldn’t see eye to eye with each other were perfect friends with him, thought amazingly fast, someone’d throw a puzzle and he’ would solve it the fastest amongst them. One could just say – almost perfect.”

ps: a note on RSA & RSA129.
In cryptography, RSA is an algorithm for public-key encryption. It was the first algorithm known to be suitable for signing as well as encryption, and one of the first great advances in public key cryptography. RSA is still widely used in electronic commerce protocols, and is believed to be secure given sufficiently long keys.
It was invented by 3 MIT students Rivest,Shamir and Aldeman and is based on the fact that large numbers are very difficult to factorize.
RSA129 was a certain 129-digit number containing a coded message published in Scientific American. It was said that it would take 20,000 years to factorize it. Well ! it took 17 years to devise a calculation that took less than a year from start to finish. In ’94, the 64 and 65 digit prime numbers which were its factors were found.

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