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I asked people if they understood and/or enjoyed the talk Reeds gave. Students seemed to like the talk, and said they wanted more.

I then asked a student to present her solution to the Cubing problem. We discussed Cubing and Cube Inquiry. This was a homework problem. I had gotten a great deal of e-mail about it. Many students didn't find the level of abstraction needed to do the problem approachable. They did the problem by analyzing examples rather than with algebraic reasoning. The problem needs to be rewritten and perhaps more work done in class.

I tried to discuss P vs. NP -- and learned that I hadn't even made clear what the abbreviations were for. I tried to emphasize that there seemed to be problems which were intrinsically difficult, that had no "fast" ways of doing them. I handed out notes on this material [PDF|PS|TeX] and emphasized that such considerations were at the foundation of many modern crypto protocols. I don't think this material, which seems to be subtle, was presented as well as it could be.

I then briefly discussed the history of public key cryptography, with emphasis on the discovery inside the British security apparatus which predated the public discoveries (as discussed in Singh's The Codebook). I said that in the next two weeks we would meet the principal ideas of public key cryptography, including Diffie-Hellman and RSA.

Then I passed out the experimentation homework and strongly urged people to do it before Wednesday [PDF|PS|TeX]. I commented that what I had discussed was theory, but a sure way of really believed what we were about to learn was to have some real examples, and we could use Maple to do what might be tedious arithmetic. Also, I wrote that "... giving such an assignment would have been nearly impossible 5 to 10 years ago." Students could not have possessed the computing capacity, and having it so accessible is just wonderful.

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