A history of elliptic curves in tweets (opens in new tab)

(vnhacker.blogspot.com)

54 pointsbeefhash5y ago16 comments

16 comments

This is cute, but I would much rather see this history written out as a serious non-tweety article. There is a ton of fascinating and useful information hiding underneath the humor.

pbsd5y ago

If you really want to know, you could cover most of it with [1,2].

[1] https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/2...

[2] https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/2...

jbmsf5y ago

This is great! Thank you.

lisper5y ago

Thanks!

mhh__5y ago

Go and read a maths textbook then?

I'm not being facetious, some books are much less Theorem Lemma Proof (and nothing else) than others.

ajkjk5y ago

Math textbooks are really bad at giving a high-level overview of a whole lineage of ideas like this. I would love to read the long-form article on this subject for a mathematically-competent reader, but have no desire to actually study the subject in detail.

lisper5y ago

You may not be facetious, but you are being condescending by implying that I have never read a math textbook, or that I have made no attempt to find this information. In fact, I have read fairly extensively about elliptic curves and I have never seen any source that describes the history. To the contrary, many sources say that elliptic curves have nothing to do with ellipses, but this series of tweets seems to imply that this isn't true. So if you want to point me to an actual source, that would be much appreciated. But all you have to say is RTFM then my response is STFU.

3 more replies

asutekku5y ago

There are a lot of other mediums that explain it differently. Not everything has to be written in a dry textbook flavour.

AQXt5y ago

> NSA: Use our curves. They were selected randomly. Promise, wink wink.

Here's a better explanation about this cryptic tweet:

Backdoors in NIST elliptic curves

Of particular concern are the NIST standard elliptic curves. There is a concern that these were some-how “cooked” to facilitate an NSA backdoor into elliptic curve cryptography. The suspicion is that while the vast majority of elliptic curves are secure, these ones were deliberately chosen as having a mathematical weakness known only to the NSA.

https://miracl.com/blog/backdoors-in-nist-elliptic-curves/

vessenes5y ago

I’m not a bernsteintheist, but I must be a little bit of one after all, because I was like “hey, he went to a lot of work to show he had nothing up his sleeve..”

Lisper here says that he wished for a serious writeup, I agree — right now this is a set of in-jokes; it would make a fantastic Quanta Magazine article, or two, or n..

MrXOR5y ago

Shor: Are you sure?

NSA: Antoine Joux > Quantum Computers, Like him!

Crown Sterling: We sell CADO-NFS™ for breaking ECDSA of Nakamoto's funny money.

To be continued ...

zackmorris5y ago

I wish I could find a good primer on elliptic integrals. They come up constantly in magnetic fields and are impractically hard to solve. I mean you can do it, and I've seen it done, but give myself 5% odds of pulling it off myself. My feeling is that this is why only a handful of magnetic field equations are provided in textbooks.

peter_d_sherman5y ago

Utterly brilliant!

A great mathematical mind -- meets a great ability to summarize the works of previous mathematicians (not easy to do!)!

Worth re-reading in the future!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

16 comments

lisper5y ago

This is cute, but I would much rather see this history written out as a serious non-tweety article. There is a ton of fascinating and useful information hiding underneath the humor.

pbsd5y ago

If you really want to know, you could cover most of it with [1,2].

[1] https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/2...

[2] https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/2...

jbmsf5y ago

This is great! Thank you.

lisper5y ago

Thanks!

mhh__5y ago

Go and read a maths textbook then?

I'm not being facetious, some books are much less Theorem Lemma Proof (and nothing else) than others.

ajkjk5y ago

lisper5y ago

3 more replies

asutekku5y ago

There are a lot of other mediums that explain it differently. Not everything has to be written in a dry textbook flavour.

AQXt5y ago

> NSA: Use our curves. They were selected randomly. Promise, wink wink.

Here's a better explanation about this cryptic tweet:

Backdoors in NIST elliptic curves

https://miracl.com/blog/backdoors-in-nist-elliptic-curves/

vessenes5y ago

I’m not a bernsteintheist, but I must be a little bit of one after all, because I was like “hey, he went to a lot of work to show he had nothing up his sleeve..”

Lisper here says that he wished for a serious writeup, I agree — right now this is a set of in-jokes; it would make a fantastic Quanta Magazine article, or two, or n..

MrXOR5y ago

Shor: Are you sure?

NSA: Antoine Joux > Quantum Computers, Like him!

Crown Sterling: We sell CADO-NFS™ for breaking ECDSA of Nakamoto's funny money.

To be continued ...

zackmorris5y ago

peter_d_sherman5y ago

Utterly brilliant!

A great mathematical mind -- meets a great ability to summarize the works of previous mathematicians (not easy to do!)!

Worth re-reading in the future!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse