3.9, due Fri Oct 12th

1. The most difficult part was conceptualizing a square root modulus n. Also, how to find it was a little unclear in my brain.

2. The most interesting and satisfying part was how square roots are simply the positive and negative side of each other; it holds true for integers as well!

Mathematics of Voting, Donald Saari

1. Difficult: How "fair" is determined by the Borda method. i.e. what if the weight that people want some candidates is not distributed evenly? If they want a canditate a total of 1 = %100, then a possible Borda vote could represent ABCD as(3/6,1/3,1/6,0) but what if the candidate wants ABCD to the tune of (3/4,3/8,1/8) or some other vector?

2. Interesting: Mathematics of Voting by Donald Saari was the best lecture I have been to in a long time!! Take-home message was: 70% of the time our voting method actually determines the elected candidate, rather than being elected by the "people"!

Dark Matter by Donald Saari, due whenever(epsilon EC/makeup)

1. The most difficult part for me was following the physics equations stuff like angular momentum and rotational velocity.

2. There were a lot of interesting parts. Like how dark matter is just unobserved mass, and that the current thought is it exists in a halo form. Also, the way we weigh the mass of the sun was pretty interesting. I liked how dark matter is calculated although I see a lot of room for error in that calculation. (just like he does)

6.2, due Wednesday October 10th

1. The most difficult part of this reading was to understand how Eve might do such a thing; must she know how p and q were chosen to rely on these methods? Also, how common is it that these attacks on RSA are even plausible? Also I didn't really understand OAEP very well or the proof of the timing attacks.

2. I think it's interesting that by using principles of continued fractions, Eve can decode a message between Alice and Bob. I also thought it was ingenius to be able to discover the d exponent by timing the computation times for a series of decryptions!

3.12, due Monday Oct 8th

1. I liked the reading a lot. I'm glad it was really short because it made general conference weekend slightly less busy:)

2. I didn't understand exactly how the process of approximation works...I probably read it too fast and not enough times. Usually I reread the section; but I didn't this time.

6.1, due October 5th

1. I don't understand how c to the d can decrypt the message; then how do you choose large p and q randomly?

2. I like how secure this method is; the chance Eve can find p,q, or d is tremendously small even with large amounts of effort. PGP sounds also interesting; is it the main method for encrypting e-mails or is that RSA encryption?

3.6 and 3.7, due Wednesday Oct 3rd

1. I did not understand Euler's Theorem very well. For when n is prime, I do (because it's identical to Fermat's Little Thm) but if it is not, I don't get it very well.

2. I liked reading about three-pass protocol and about primitive roots. Primitive roots I was already somewhat familiar with but three-pass protocol I was completely new to and turns out to be a great use of inverses!