Word: mathematician
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...Israeli mathematician cracks a formidable code...
...computer scientists at Stanford and M.I.T. made a pair of chummy but keenly competitive $100 bets. A team at each university had devised a secret code to protect computers from electronic intruders by scrambling and unscrambling the data in a complex fashion. Each team offered cash to the first mathematician who could crack its code, figuring that the deciphering could not be done in much less than a million years. To the surprise of all concerned, however, the Stanford scheme sprang a leak this year, putting $100 in the pocket of a determined young Israeli theoretician and raising troublesome...
...banks and multinational firms do business. Consider the stakes: the U.S. banking system alone moves some $400 billion by computer around the country every day; yet many banks pump money onto the wires and over satellite networks with little or no encryption, or coding, at all. Predicts Mathematician Ralph Merkle, a member of the Stanford codemaking team: "One of these days someone will break into a wire-transfer banking network and siphon off all the contents. Then there will be a lot of interest in cryptography...
...M.I.T. in the late '70s as an associate professor of mathematics, and in fact helped write the M.I.T. code that competes head-on with Stanford's. Last spring, back in his spartan, second-floor office in the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, the lean, blue-jeaned mathematician settled the old wager: he found a way to unravel the original Stanford system. The code Shamir broke after four years of hard work was no Buck Rogers-Dick Tracy cipher. It was a charter member, along with the M.I.T. code, of the new "public key" family of encryption schemes...
...Logo's immediate result is it establishes a good first impression," says Seymour Papert, 59, the gray-bearded, South African-born M.I.T. mathematician whose theoretical work in the arcane field of artificial intelligence led to Logo. "It convinces the child that he can master the machine. It lets him say, 'I'm the boss.' " Says Dr. Sylvia Weir, a pediatrician who works with the Educational Computing Group at M.I.T: "People have usually considered the stupid thing in the classroom the child. Now the stupid thing, as it were, is the computer. And the child...