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14. Don Zagier, “The First 50 Million Prime Numbers,” The Mathematical Intelligencer
1, no. 0 (1977): 8. Similar sentiments abound: “Number theory targets the most
fundamental object of a human's mind: integer numbers. Its questions can be
explained to high school students, while getting answers requires very deep and
convoluted arguments. Its internal beauty has always been an irresistible attraction
for mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, and enthusiastic amateurs. Fur-
thermore, its primal motivation has always been our natural intellectual curiosity
rather than everyday practical needs.” Shparlinski, “Numbers at Work and Play,”
334. On the purity of number theory, G. H. Hardy famously wrote, “It is sometimes
suggested that pure mathematicians glory in the uselessness of their work, and make
it a boast that it has no practical applications. The imputation is usually based on
an incautious saying attributed to Gauss, to the effect that, if mathematics is the
queen of the sciences, then the theory of numbers is, because of its supreme useless-
ness, the queen of mathematics—I have never been able to find an exact quotation.”
G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1940), 120. Prime numbers have even inspired poetry: “None can foretell their
coming. / Among the ordinal numbers / They do not reserve their seats, arrive
unexpected. / Along the lines of cardinals / They rise like surprising pontiffs, / Each
absolute, inscrutable, self-elected.” Helen Spalding, “Let Us Now Praise Prime
Numbers,” in Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics , ed. Sarah Glaz and
JoAnne Growney (Wellesley: A. K. Peters, Ltd., 2008), 190.
15. Martin Gardner, When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish: And Other Specula-
tions about This and That (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 124.
16. Carl Pomerance, “Prime Numbers and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelli-
gence,” in Mathematical Adventures for Students and Amateurs , ed. David F. Hayes and
Tatiana Shubin (Washington, DC: The Mathematical Association of America, 2004), 2.
17. Gina Bari Kolata, “Cryptography: On the Brink of a Revolution?” Science 197,
no. 4305 (1977): 747; Martin Gardner, “A New Kind of Cipher That Would Take
Millions of Years to Break,” Scientific American 237, no. 8 (1977): 120-124.
18. Derek Atkins, Michael Graff, Arjen Lenstra, and Paul Leyland, “The Magic Words
Are Squeamish Ossifrage,” in Advances in Cryptology—ASIACRYPT '94 , ed. Josef
Pieprzyk and Reihanah Safavi-Naini (Berlin: Springer, 1994), 261-277.
19. CRYPTO '83 became the first conference officially sponsored by the IACR, which
now sponsors the annual CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT, and ASIACRYPT conferences, as
well as the Journal of Cryptology . See http://www.iacr.org.
20. David Kahn's report on EUROCRYPT '83 notes that officials from governmental
defense and cryptological agencies, including the NSA, were openly present. David
Kahn, “EUROCRYPT 83: A Report,” Cryptologia 7, no. 3 (1983): 254-256.
21. Susan Landau, “Primes, Codes and the National Security Agency,” Notices of the
American Mathematical Society 30, no. 1 (1983): 7-10.
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