
A history of elliptic curves in tweets - beefhash
https://vnhacker.blogspot.com/2020/09/a-history-of-elliptic-curves-in-tweets.html
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lisper
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.

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pbsd
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...](https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/22/Polya/07468342.di020792.02p05747.pdf)

[2]
[https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/2...](https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/2/Rice-2013.pdf)

~~~
jbmsf
This is great! Thank you.

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AQXt
> 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/](https://miracl.com/blog/backdoors-in-nist-elliptic-curves/)

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vessenes
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..

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MrXOR
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 ...

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zackmorris
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.

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peter_d_sherman
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!

