Friday, April 24, 2009 – How Euclid, Fermat and Euler Helped Modern Internet Security

I love stories like this. Here you have some relatively obscure mathematical works, Euclid in about 300 BC, Fermat, in 1640 and Euler in 1736, who all discovered algorithms and theorems that were key to helping Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman at MIT in 1977 to invent the RSA (the first letters of their last names) system of cryptography. This is the system used in modern internet security. Click on the name of the pdf file below, to see how this all happened.

How Euclid, Fermat and Euler Helped Modern Internet Security