Quotes from Simon Singh

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.

Správné použití kvalitní Å¡ifry je velkou pomocí pro obÄ› komunikující strany, avÅ¡ak nekorektní zacházení se slabou Å¡ifrou m?že vyvolat velmi faleÅ¡ný pocit bezpe?í.

The first microdot to be spotted by the FBI was in 1941, following a tip-off that the Americans should look for a tiny gleam from the surface of a letter, indicative of smooth film.

Ã…â"¢íká se, že zkratka NSA ve skute?nosti znamená "Never Say Anything

When Hermann Göring visited Warsaw in 1934, he was totally unaware of the fact that his communications were being intercepted and deciphered. As he and other German dignitaries laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier next to the offices of the Biuro Szyfrów, Rejewski could stare down at them from his window, content in the knowledge that he could read their most secret communications.

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

Number theorists consider prime numbers to be the most important numbers of all because they are the atoms of mathematics. Prime numbers are the numerical building blocks because all other numbers can be created by multiplying combinations of the prime numbers.

On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanely butchered by the hands of Peter the Reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics; her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.

We would be in real trouble if everybody in GCHQ was like him, but we can tolerate a higher proportion of such people than most organizations. We put up with a number of people like him. Figure 66 James Ellis. (photo credit 6.4) One of Ellis's greatest qualities was his breadth of knowledge.

first ever military cryptographic device, the Spartan scytale, dating back to the fifth century B.C. The scytale is a wooden staff around which a strip of leather or parchment is wound

Stát, který v??í, že není správné ?íst cizí dopisy, ?asem za?ne v??it i tomu, že jeho korespondenci také nikdo ne?te...

Zimmermann employed a neat trick that used asymmetric RSA encryption in tandem with old-fashioned symmetric encryption.

baseball is a game played by the dexterous, but only understood by the Poindexterous."9

The German military were equally unenthusiastic, because they were oblivious to the damage caused by their insecure ciphers during the Great War. For example, they had been led to believe that the Zimmermann telegram had been stolen by American spies in Mexico, and so they blamed that failure on Mexican security. They still did not realize that the telegram had in fact been intercepted and deciphered by the British, and that the Zimmermann debacle was actually a failure of German cryptography.

Jestliže nÄ›kdy platí, že nutnost je matkou invence, pak je rovn?ž možné, že ohrožení je matkou kryptoanalýzy.

Po první svÄ›tové válce se Spojenci nebáli nikoho.

Pythagoras, the teacher, paid his student three oboli for each lesson he attended

Polský úspÄ›ch v prolomení Enigmy byl dán tÃ…â"¢emi faktory: strachem, matematikou a Å¡pionáží.

NaÅ¡tÄ›stí nahoÃ…â"¢e nevÄ›dÄ›li, že Turing je homosexuál, jinak bychom také mohli prohrát válku.

Each member of the school was forced to swear an oath never to reveal to the outside world any of their mathematical discoveries.

The problem looks so straightforward because it is based on the one piece of mathematics that everyone can remember – Pythagoras' theorem: In a right-angled triangle the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.

Even after Pythagoras's death a member of the Brotherhood was drowned for breaking his oath—he publicly announced the discovery of a new regular solid, the dodecahedron, constructed from twelve regular pentagons.

Kolem roku 1790, když byla ratifikována Listina svobod, mohl soukromÄ› mluvit kdokoliv s kýmkoliv - s jistotou, jakou už dnes nemá nikdo - prostÄ› tak, že popoÅ¡el po cestÄ› kousek od ostatních a podíval se, jestli se nÄ›kdo neskrývá v keÃ…â"¢ích.

Because a quantum computer deals with 1's and 0's that are in a quantum superposition, they are called quantum bits, or qubits (pronounced "cubits"). The advantage of qubits becomes even clearer when we consider more particles.