Maths Should be Free

Edward Frenkel, a mathematics professor at Berkeley, agrees fully with the US Supreme Court ruling on this topic:
“A scientific truth, or the mathematical expression of it, is not a patentable invention.”
Additionally, he also feels that:
“This inherent democracy has always been the mark of mathematics: It belongs to us all, even if people are not aware of it.”

That is why he is so incensed with the notorious NSA (the US agency that was revealed to be spying on pretty much everyone) for intentionally undermining encryption algorithms used world over. (After all, if they can’t decrypt, how can they spy?)

Parts of our Internet communication are encrypted (which is why we are willing to enter our card details on the Net). Frenkel tell us that many cryptosystems are based on sophisticated mathematical objects called “elliptic curves” (don’t worry: we don’t need to know anything other the term itself for this blog). But here’s the catch:
“It turns out that there are some elliptic curves that look random but actually allow for easy decryption; that's an example of a backdoor.”
It turns out that the NSA has been pushing US encryption standards institutes and various vendors to use such “compromised” elliptic curves. This makes it easy for the NSA to crack the code. Additionally, others may independently find ways to do the same in future:
“You can hide a formula, but you can't prevent others from finding it… And once the secret is out in the open, it’s not just Big Brother that will be watching us—other “brothers” will be spying on us, intercepting our messages, and hacking our bank accounts.”

Frenkel points out that all this may not have been a big deal in the pre-Internet world. But today, he says:
“Encryption is now woven in the very fabric of our daily lives. That’s why creation of secret means for breaking commonly used cryptosystems by the government is so troubling.”

So he urges other mathematicians to introspect, sort of the way physicists did after the creation of the atomic bomb:
“We need to find mechanisms to protect the freedom of mathematical knowledge that we love and cherish. And we have to help the public understand both the awesome power of math and the serious consequences that await all of us if that power is misused.”

GH Hardy was so wrong when he thought that maths can ever be pure, i.e., without practical uses.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more