Keeping it Safe and Quiet
Most mathematical research is published in academic journals or discussed at conferences, but some of the mathematicians who work in the area of cryptography realise that the rules are different for them. If they discover a new code or crack an existing code, then national security concerns might mean that their work is kept secret for years or decades.
For example, the Bletchley Park codebreakers had to wait until the 1970s before their contribution to the war effort was declassified, by which time many of the leading figures had already died. Alan Turing, perhaps the most famous Bletchley codebreaker, tragically committed suicide in 1954, having received no public recognition for his contribution to breaking the German Enigma code. As 2012 is the centenary of his birth, many mathematicians and historians hope that this will be an opportunity to remember his genius and the extraordinary efforts of his Bletchley colleagues.
Although modern encryption is a more public affair, because of its relevance to the general public and businesses, there is still a large amount of clandestine cryptography, and there are cryptographers whose brilliance continues to be shrouded in government secrecy. Indeed, while writing 'The Code Book', I discovered that a vital cryptographic invention, something that many of us use every day, has its own secret history.
The invention is something called public key cryptography (PKC), which is vital to how we exchange data in the information age. Without PKC, everything from e-commerce to secure phone calls would not be possible. First, I will explain why PKC is necessary, then I will explain how it works, then who discovered it, and then who really discovered it.