Quotes from Simon Singh

The Brotherhood was effectively a religious community, and one of the idols they worshiped was Number.

diagonally polarized photons are in a quantum quandary when confronted by a vertical Polaroid filter.

Lidé zapojení do debaty o Å¡ifrování jsou vesmÄ›s inteligentní, ?estní a jsou pro depozici klí??, ale nikdy nemají více než dvÄ› tyto vlastnosti najednou.

The correct use of a strong cipher is a clear boon to sender and receiver, but the misuse of a weak cipher can generate a very false sense of security.

Každý, kdo pÃ…â"¢emýÅ¡lí o kvantové mechanice, aniž by se mu zato?ila hlava, jí nerozumí.

In my mind, the most noble way to leave your mark on the world is to expand man's understanding of the world.

half of them at random will be blocked, and half will pass through, and those that do pass through will be reoriented with a vertical polarization.

significance of the key, as opposed to the algorithm, is an enduring principle of cryptography. It was definitively stated in 1883 by the Dutch linguist Auguste Kerckhoffs von Nieuwenhof in his book La Cryptographie militaire: "Kerckhoffs' Principle: The security of a cryptosystem must not depend on keeping secret the crypto-algorithm. The security depends only on keeping secret the key.

It is the same with life. Some are influenced by the love of wealth while others are blindly led on by the mad fever for power and domination, but the finest type of man gives himself up to discovering the meaning and purpose of life itself. He seeks to uncover the secrets of nature. This is the man I call a philosopher for although no man is completely wise in all respects, he can love wisdom as the key to nature's secrets.

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.

It has been said that the First World War was the chemists' war, because mustard gas and chlorine were employed for the first time, and that the Second World War was the physicists' war, because the atom bomb was detonated. Similarly, it has been argued that the Third World War would be the mathematicians' war, because mathematicians will have control over the next great weapon of war—information.

The Vigenère cipher was called "le chiffre indéchiffrable," but Babbage broke it;

250 qubits, it is possible to represent roughly 1075 combinations, which is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. If it were possible to achieve the appropriate superposition with 250 particles, then a quantum computer could perform 1075 simultaneous computations

although there are plenty of numbers whose divisors add up to one less than the number itself, that is to say only slightly defective, there appear to be no numbers that are slightly excessive.

Codebreakers are linguistic alchemists, a mystical tribe attempting to conjure sensible words out of meaningless symbols.

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.

Euclid discovered that perfect numbers are always the multiple of two numbers, one of which is a power of 2 and the other being the next power of 2 minus 1.

The letters a and l are the most common in Arabic, partly because of the definite article al-, whereas the letter j appears only a tenth as frequently.

By depriving Rejewski of the keys, Langer believed he was preparing him for the inevitable time when the keys would no longer be available. He knew that if war broke out it would be impossible for Schmidt to continue to attend covert meetings, and Rejewski would then be forced to be self-sufficient. Langer thought that Rejewski should practice self-sufficiency in peacetime, as preparation for what lay ahead.

The construction of mathematical logic had become the arbiter of truth. This was the Pythagoreans' greatest contribution to civilisation - a way of achieving truth which is beyond the fallibility of human judgement.

meantime, here is a list of degrees for five of the nerdiest writers: J. STEWART BURNS BS Mathematics, Harvard University MS Mathematics, UC Berkeley DAVID S. COHEN BS Physics, Harvard University MS Computer Science, UC Berkeley AL JEAN BS Mathematics, Harvard University KEN KEELER BS Applied Mathematics, Harvard University PhD Applied Mathematics, Harvard University JEFF WESTBROOK BS Physics, Harvard University PhD Computer Science, Princeton University

He was gifted with the special capability of making many mistakes, mostly in the right direction. I envied him for this and tried in vain to imitate him, but found it quite difficult to make good mistakes.

In June 1991 he took the drastic step of asking a friend to post PGP on a Usenet bulletin board. PGP is just a piece of software, and so from the bulletin board it could be downloaded by anyone for free. PGP was now loose on the Internet.

Perhaps the greatest danger in the way that alternative therapists behave is simply the promotion of their own treatments when patients should be in the care of a conventional doctor. There are numerous reports of patients with serious conditions (e.g. diabetes, cancer, AIDS) suffering harm after following irresponsible advice form alternative practitioners instead of following the advice of a doctor.