Science Magazine on Mathematical Creativity

There was a great article published today in Science about mathematicians, where their funding comes from, and how it affects the research they do (and I’ll unabashedly say that I think mathematics is one of the most beautiful forms of creativity in the world 🙂 ).

This article also serves as an interesting follow-up to my earlier post about whether the government is helping or hurting cryptographers. It talks about the flawed DUAL_EC_DRBG PRNG that the NSA pressured NIST to approve as a standard (it was mind-blowingly slow, so thankfully it was never widely used, except by RSA; but this is a very ugly example of the “hurt” side of the flip-flop).

And there’s your acronym soup for the day — hopefully, it helps with the cold going around Allard Hall right now (as a substitute for chicken-noodle soup), heh.

Cheers!