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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 92578ce | The core principle of the trial is simple and can be traced back as far as the 13th century, when the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II conducted an experiment to find out the effects of exercise on digestion. Two knights consumed identical meals, and then one went hunting while the other rested in bed. Several hours later, both knights were killed and the contents of their alimentary canals were examined. This revealed that digestion had pro.. | Simon Singh | ||
| 3f565e5 | In April 1977, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman spent Passover at the house of a student, and had consumed significant amounts of Manischewitz wine before returning to their respective homes some time around midnight. Rivest, unable to sleep, lay on his couch reading a mathematics textbook. He began mulling over the question that had been puzzling him for weeks--is it possible to build an asymmetric cipher? Is it possible to find a one-way functi.. | Simon Singh | ||
| 27647c1 | Al-Kindi's technique, known as frequency analysis, shows that it is unnecessary to check each of the billions of potential keys. Instead, it is possible to reveal the contents of a scrambled message simply by analysing the frequency of the characters in the ciphertext. | Simon Singh | ||
| 439acb1 | I am a liar! | Simon Singh | ||
| 0ebbd27 | The mathematical life of a mathematician is short. Work rarely improves after the age of twenty-five or thirty. If little has been accomplished by then, little will ever be accomplished. | Simon Singh | ||
| 4370290 | 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 to come and write for . After the paper was accepted, there was an extremely long lag between it being submitted, revised, and published. So, by the time the paper was published, I had been working at for a while, and Ken Keeler had also b.. | Simon Singh | ||
| f54f231 | I had this very rare privilege of being able to pursue in my life what had been my childhood dream. I know it's a rare privilege, but if you can tackle something in adult life that means that much to you, then it's more rewarding than anything imaginable." - Andrew Wiles" | Simon Singh | ||
| f5af5cf | He'd asked Simon about that. Why would the archangels potentially sabotage an organization that made their lives a hell of a lot easier? "It's a game," Simon had said. "They need us, but they'll never allow us to forget that they're the more powerful. Attacking me, attacking Sara, isn't about stopping the Guild--it's about reminding us the Cadre is watching." | Nalini Singh | ||
| 30c53b5 | Codebreakers are linguistic alchemists, a mystical tribe attempting to conjure sensible words out of meaningless symbols. | Simon Singh | ||
| 1267456 | Vigenere's work culminated in his Traicte 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 of Scots. If only Mary's secretary had read this treatise, he would have known about the Vigenere cipher, Mary's messages to Babington would have baffled Phelippes, and her life might have been spared." -- | Simon Singh | ||
| b0e068a | As a society, we rightly adore our great musicians and novelists, yet we seldom hear any mention of the humble mathematician. It is clear that mathematics is not considered part of our culture. Instead, mathematics is generally feared and mathematicians are often mocked. | Simon Singh | ||
| ba8676f | many shipwrecks and engineering disasters were blamed on faulty tables. These mathematical tables were calculated by hand, and the mistakes were simply the result of human error. This caused Babbage to exclaim, "I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!" This marked the beginning of an extraordinary endeavor to build a machine capable of faultlessly calculating the tables to a high degree of accuracy. In 1823 Babbage desi.. | Simon Singh | ||
| 40c1f85 | 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 and flexible (e.g., snake, thong), granular (e.g., sugar, salt), bundled (e.g., hay), viscous (e.g., mud, feces) and many others. The verb will also incorporate adverbs, and will reflect whether or not the speaker has experienced what he or she .. | Simon Singh | ||
| 48bb2f4 | the Vigenere cipher belongs to a class known as polyalphabetic, because it employs several cipher alphabets per message. The polyalphabetic nature of the Vigenere cipher is what gives it its strength, but it also makes it much more complicated to use. The additional effort required in order to implement the Vigenere cipher discouraged many people from employing it. | Simon Singh | ||
| 1d8b28f | Major General Howard Conner, "without the Navajos, the marines would never have taken Iwo Jima." | Simon Singh | ||
| 568e6ab | had the cipher machines been used properly--without repeated message keys, without cillies, without restrictions on plugboard settings and scrambler arrangements, and without stereotypical messages which resulted in cribs--it is quite possible that they might never have been broken at all. | Simon Singh | ||
| 69d8463 | Proof is what lies at the heart of maths, and is what marks it out from other sciences. Other sciences have hypotheses that are tested against experimental evidence until they fail, and are overtaken by new hypotheses. In maths, absolute proof is the goal, and once something is proved, it is proved forever, with no room for change. | Simon Singh | ||
| b3ec3b8 | 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." | Simon Singh | ||
| d7a2038 | I recall thinking that this paper would be the least interesting paper that I will ever be on." Adleman could not have been more wrong. The system, dubbed RSA (Rivest, Shamir, Adleman) as opposed to ARS, went on to become the most influential cipher in modern cryptography." | Simon Singh | ||
| 5ed8174 | copies were passed to the cryptanalysts, who sat in little kiosks, ready to tease out the meanings of the messages. As well as supplying the emperors of Austria with invaluable intelligence, the Viennese Black Chamber sold the information it harvested to other powers in Europe. In 1774 an | Simon Singh | ||
| 8a8dc2f | Stat, ktery veri, ze neni spravne cist cizi dopisy, casem zacne verit i tomu, ze jeho korespondenci take nikdo necte... | Simon Singh | ||
| 44b7768 | baseball is a game played by the dexterous, but only understood by the Poindexterous."9" | Simon Singh | ||
| cce6c71 | Nastesti nahore nevedeli, ze Turing je homosexual, jinak bychom take mohli prohrat valku. | Simon Singh | ||
| aa91b93 | Kazdy, kdo premysli o kvantove mechanice, aniz by se mu zatocila hlava, ji nerozumi. | Simon Singh | ||
| 307eed7 | que p | Simon Singh | ||
| 31a5fc1 | One of the features of the Enigma machine was its inability to encipher a letter as itself, which was a consequence of the reflector. The letter a could never be enciphered as A, the letter b could never be enciphered as B, and so on. | Simon Singh | ||
| fb10039 | Turing needed more staff, but his requests had been blocked by Commander Edward Travis, who had taken over as Director of Bletchley, and who felt that he could not justify recruiting more people. On October 21, 1941, the cryptanalysts took the insubordinate step of ignoring Travis and writing directly to Churchill. | Simon Singh | ||
| 50b95de | war, instead of finishing in 1945, would have ended in 1948 had the Government Code and Cypher School not been able to read the Enigma cyphers and produce the Ultra intelligence." During this period of delay, additional lives would have been lost in Europe, and Hitler would have been able to make greater use of his V-weapons, inflicting damage throughout southern England. The historian David Kahn summarizes the impact of breaking Enigma: "I.. | Simon Singh | ||
| f183060 | Even the Vatican, probably the second most active center of cryptanalysis, would send Soro seemingly impenetrable messages that had fallen into its hands. In 1526, Pope Clement VII sent him two encrypted messages, and both were returned having been successfully cryptanalyzed. | Simon Singh | ||
| afa9e87 | imagined a machine whose internal workings could be altered so that it could perform all the functions of all conceivable Turing machines. The alterations would be made by inserting carefully selected tapes, which transformed the single flexible machine into a dividing machine, a multiplying machine, or any other type of machine. Turing called this hypothetical device a universal Turing machine because it would be capable of answering any q.. | Simon Singh | ||
| a8b84f3 | Turing knew of Babbage's work, and the universal Turing machine can be seen as a reincarnation of Difference Engine No. 2. In fact, Turing had gone much further, and provided computing with a solid theoretical basis, | Simon Singh | ||
| 2ad6c5f | A large amount of identically encrypted material provides a cryptanalyst with a correspondingly larger chance of identifying the key. | Simon Singh | ||
| 679f8e0 | the Germans therefore took the clever step of using the day key settings to transmit a new message key for each message. | Simon Singh | ||
| 1dd7bef | The fundamental weakness of the Vigenere cipher is its cyclical nature. If the keyword is five letters long, then every fifth letter of the plaintext is encrypted according to the same cipher alphabet. If the cryptanalyst can identify the length of the keyword, the ciphertext can be treated as a series of five monoalphabetic ciphers, and each one can be broken by frequency analysis. However, consider what happens as the keyword gets longer... | Simon Singh | ||
| 70840ab | Rejewski had vastly simplified the task of finding the day key by divorcing the problem of finding the scrambler settings from the problem of finding the plugboard settings. On their own, both of these problems were solvable. Originally, we estimated that it would take more than the lifetime of the universe to check every possible Enigma key. However, Rejewski had spent only a year compiling his catalogue of chain lengths, and thereafter he.. | Simon Singh | ||
| e8e5817 | the First World War was the chemists' war, because mustard gas and chlorine were employed for the first time, | Simon Singh | ||
| 97ea716 | Second World War was the physicists' war, because the atom bomb was detonated. | Simon Singh | ||
| 7b6d346 | 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 unbreakable, just as the Vigenere cipher was in the nineteenth century, it really is absolutely secure | Simon Singh | ||
| 430c3be | 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 codes that are currently used to protect military information. | Simon Singh | ||
| ba0308b | The fate of the Polish nation had depended on Rejewski, and he did not disappoint his country. Rejewski's attack on Enigma is one of the truly great accomplishments of cryptanalysis. | Simon Singh | ||
| f76f6ed | it requires a great deal of time, effort and money to create a random key. The best random keys are created by harnessing natural physical processes, such as radioactivity, which is known to exhibit truly random behavior. The cryptographer could place a lump of radioactive material on a bench, and detect its emissions with a Geiger counter. Sometimes the emissions follow each other in rapid succession, sometimes there are long delays--the t.. | Simon Singh | ||
| 1a71040 | Histaiaeus shaved the head of his messenger, wrote the message on his scalp, and then waited for the hair to regrow. This was clearly a period of history that tolerated a certain lack of urgency. | Simon Singh | ||
| 654fa63 | Secret communication achieved by hiding the existence of a message is known as steganography | Simon Singh | ||
| 7b3fc37 | the hotline between the presidents of Russia and America is secured via a onetime pad cipher. | Simon Singh |