Quotes from Simon Singh

A problem worthy of attack Proves its worth by fighting back. Piet Hein

In the 1970s, banks attempted to distribute keys by employing special dispatch riders who had been vetted and who were among the company's most trusted employees.

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 much harder to crack.

dispatch riders would race across the world with padlocked briefcases, personally distributing keys to everyone who would receive messages from the bank over the next week. As business networks grew in size, as more messages were sent, and as more keys had to be delivered, the banks found that this distribution process became a horrendous logistical nightmare, and the overhead costs became prohibitive.

alphabetic scripts tend to have between 20 and 40 characters (Russian, for example, has 36 signs, and Arabic has 28).

When ships carrying COMSEC material came into dock, crypto-custodians would march onboard, collect stacks of cards, paper tapes, floppy disks, or whatever other medium the keys might be stored on, and then deliver them to the intended recipients.

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 and swallowed great quantities of water in order to reach the minimum weight requirement of 120 pounds.

scripts that rely on semagrams tend to have hundreds or even thousands of signs (Chinese has over 5,000).

Quantum cryptography is an unbreakable system of encryption.

They called the Navajo language a "weird succession of guttural, nasal, tongue-twisting sounds Ã¢â'¬Â¦ we couldn't even transcribe it, much less crack it.

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.

Lisa Simpson is the kind of child we not only want our children to be, but also the kind of child we want all children to be.

one-way functions are sometimes called Humpty Dumpty functions. Modular arithmetic, sometimes called clock arithmetic in schools, is an area of mathematics that is rich in one-way functions. In modular arithmetic, mathematicians consider a finite group of numbers arranged in a loop

I am a liar!

A Navajo message could never be faked and could always be trusted.

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were guilty of unjustified wiretaps, and President John F. Kennedy conducted dubious wiretaps in the first month of his presidency.

Codebreakers are linguistic alchemists, a mystical tribe attempting to conjure sensible words out of meaningless symbols. The history of codes and ciphers is the story of the centuries-old battle between codemakers and codebreakers, an intellectual arms race that has had a dramatic impact on the course of history.

The only people who are in a position to point out my errors are also those who are not at liberty to reveal them.

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.

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

An expert problem solver must be endowed with two incompatible qualities – a restless imagination and a patient pertinacity. Howard W. Eves

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.

it is relatively easy to scramble an egg, but to unscramble it is far harder.

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.