Matt Blaze
Fri, 09 May 2008 14:09:43 -0700
On May 8, 2008, at 19:08, Leichter, Jerry wrote:
An interesting datapoint I've always had on this question: Back in 1975 or so, a mathematician I knew (actually, he was a friend's PhD advisor)left academia to go work for the NSA. Obviously, he couldn't say anything at all about what he would be doing. The guy's specialty was algebraic geometry - a hot field at the time. This is the area of mathematics that studied eliptic curves many years before anyone realized they had any application to cryptography. In fact, it would be years before anyone on the outside could make any kind of guess about what in the world the NSA would want a specialist in algebraic geometry to do. At the time, it was one of the purest of the pure fields.
I've heard similar recollections of mathematicians from improbably abstract specialties being eagerly taken in by NSA, throughout the cold war. I've also heard it said that at one time NSA was the US's single largest employer of math PhDs. I don't know if that was actually true, but it certainly seems plausible. But it's also important to remember that crypto isn't the only area of the NSA mission that benefits from mathematical expertise. I suspect that while many of these NSA math PhDs were indeed doing cryptomathematics, a large fraction were (and are) working on other SIGINT problems such as signal processing, databases and searching, coding theory, machine learning, and so. Some of the (non-crypto) problems here seem rather specific to the NSA's domain, and so don't likely have an advanced civilian research community competing with them they way academic crypto does today. A couple of the papers from the 1970's hint (in redacted form, frustratingly) that the NSA then had large scale automatic systems for intercepting and processing morse code signals from large blocks of radio spectrum, which implies some pretty advanced (for that era) signal processing and computing, crypto aside. -matt --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]