John Nash's Declassified 1955 Letter To the NSA 93
An anonymous reader writes "In 1955, John Nash sent an amazing letter (PDF) to the NSA in order to support an encryption design that he suggested. In it, he anticipates computational complexity theory as well as modern cryptography. He also proposes that the security of encryption can be based on computational hardness and makes the distinction between polynomial time and exponential time: 'So a logical way to classify enciphering processes is by the way in which the computation length for the computation of the key increases with increasing length of the key. This is at best exponential and at worst probably at most a relatively small power of r, ar^2 or ar^3, as in substitution ciphers.'"
Re:This is impossible (Score:4, Funny)
Hand writing (Score:4, Funny)
Reading Nash's letters makes me realize how much better presentation medium powerpoint is.
And also how much junk is made to sound nice, just with a nice presentation.
(Read all of it) Nash gets form letter rejection (Score:5, Funny)