My high school chemistry teacher taught us how to use a sliderule. She
*hated* pocket calculators with a passion, and said that they rotted the
brain.
On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 7:18 AM, Jerry Feldman <g...@blu.org> wrote:
> On 01/20/2014 09:19 AM, Kevin D. Clark wrote:
>
> Lloyd Kvam writes:
>
>
> * Public Key Encryption
>
> I took a class at UNH when I was a high-school senior (wooly mammoths
> were still wandering around campus back then...). It was a class with a
> topic of number theory. I liked all of the math proofs in the class
> -- very cool stuff. I really wasn't prepared for the class but I did
> the best that I could.
>
> As I sat in these classes on Saturday mornings, it did occur to me
> that a lot of this stuff was pretty dry. I couldn't see the point of
> the mathematical excercises that we were going through ("why on Earth
> do I care if two numbers are 'relatively prime'?", I mused). I
> couldn't fathom how any of this stuff could be used in the Real World.
>
> Everything that I thought about these Saturday morning classes changed
> during the last class. We had a guest lecturer that day -- a
> professor named David Burton. He came into the classroom with a
> twinkle in his eye and told us that he was going to teach us some
> interesting things that morning. In the next two hours he taught us
> the basics of symmetric key cryptography, and then he moved onto DH
> key-exchange and public-key crypto. He built on all of the concepts
> that we had learned in previous classes. I took notes like crazy that
> morning -- this really was some interesting stuff that this Professor
> Burton was teaching us. Wow....
>
>
> Anyways, I look back upon that morning (eons ago) pretty fondly. One
> of the things that I do as a software engineer is to design and
> implement secure systems and protocols. I still use the knowledge
> that I gained on that Saturday morning as a high-school senior pretty
> frequently.
>
> Regards,
>
> --kevin
>
> When I was in High School I learned how to program a slide rule.
>
> --
> Jerry Feldman <g...@blu.org> <g...@blu.org>
> Boston Linux and Unix
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>
>
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--
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Email j...@blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / 2013 PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6
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