About : standard furniture apollo
Title : standard furniture apollo
standard furniture apollo
steve: welcome everyone. i'd like to welcomeour speaker today, ari juels. ari is the head of rsa laboratories which is part of emc andhe's written a fiction book about a young cryptographer who stumbles upon a plot involvingancient cults and a lot of intrigue. and a little background of ari. he's actuallya, has a background in latin literature and mathematics and graduated as a ph.d. fromberkeley, and surprisingly his main character is also a ph.d. from berkeley with a backgroundin classics. so i'd like to just turn it over to ari andwelcome him to speak about his book. [applause] ari juels: thank you, steve, and thanks toall of you for coming today.
many first time novelists support themselveswith day jobs and i'm no exception. as steve mentioned i work as the chief scientist ofrsa labs, the research arm of rsa, a company that some of you are probably familiar with. my lab's research is on computer securityand cryptology, encryption and other techniques for protecting computer systems. so my day job is like that of many of youin the audience. but i want to stress that my novel isn't written for computer scientists.it's written for readers; for ordinary readers. so there's a tiny bit of math in the book,but not very much and there are only two lines of pseudo code in the entire novel.
i am going to talk to you a little bit aboutcomputer security and cryptology because they loom large into 'tetraktys'. but of coursei'm not wearing my rsa labs hat and i'm not gonna talk about research. i'm gonna talk to you instead about a collisionof worlds between ideas in modern cryptology and the vision of a philosopher in ancientgreece. at first glance, computer security and theancient world don't seem to have much to do with one another. but by the end of this talki hope you'll see how these two worlds are coming together and how in the light and heatof that collision the adventure and mystery story 'tetraktys' was born.
probably the first question for most of youin the audience is, "what in blazes does the word 'tetraktys' mean?" and, and of coursei'll get to that. i feel that book talks for fiction at leastare kind of a tricky proposition. when a bakery wants you to buy a cake they give you a sample.but a book isn't like a cake; one bite of a cake tastes like the rest of the cake. butone chapter in a book doesn't taste, as it were, like all of the others. so what i would like to do instead, is totry to entice you with something more atmospheric. call it the aroma of the book. i am going to read some sample passages, buti'm gonna give you a good deal of background
for the story and a little bit of visual supportin the form of just a few slides. i'm pretty sure i'm not the first novelistto use power point and this may be a somewhat dangerous thing, but i hope you'll bear withme. okay. so our story begins with some strangecomputer infiltrations. we're not talking about vanilla hackers stealing credit cardnumbers or about foreign powers spying on corporations like the aurora attacks thatyou've been dealing with here at google. it's much stranger than that. the book opens with a passage about an assistantsecretary of state named helen abel and she's simply having a little problem with her calendar.so let me read the first chapter to you. i've
truncated it a bit. [pause] "helen abel, assistant secretary of statefor european affairs, looked gradually into the distance from a 17th century chateau.she visually traced the sandy avenue that ran the access of the vast gardens. beneathher lay two garden beds embroidered with green arabesques of faultless symmetry; low trimmedhedges winding amid a soil of rich, reddish brown. these great carpets led from the terraceof the chateau to the center of the gardens where circular fountains sent aloft a toweringplume of water. beyond lawn stretched smooth and green around basins in which rings ofjets gave forth aqueous crowns. near the horizon,
the grand canal spread its thin mirror ofwater under a tiny portico. still further in the distance, visible asa notch in the trees, was yet another rectangular lawn thrusting the strict ethic of geometryinto the surrounding forest up toward the sky. the only inhabitants of the garden were statuesdisposed here and there in decorous solitude; french ghosts of roman copies of greek originals;gods and heroes, diana, venus, jove and apollo, stone animated with the memory of motion. she'd been leaning into the huge monitor onher desk to immerse herself as thoroughly as possible. she now tilted back into thechair behind her smoky glass helm and looked
again at the screen. she really shouldn'tbe spending so much time fussing with these videos. on vacation in france the previous week aftera summit she'd fantasized about a woman, what a woman of her status might have been centuriesago. not a senior bureaucrat, but a great and noble lady. she'd looked at costumes,jewelry, palaces and gardens and spent many thousands of dollars on antiques and reproductionsin paris. she'd even bought an 18th century tiara setwith diamonds and sapphires. while other tourists were only able to look uncomprehendingly andsnap photos, she had beheld her own reflection in the glass cases of the museum aptly superimposedupon the jewels, dresses and other treasures
within. but now it was back to work. she had a staffmeeting in an hour. she turned to the black viper-like microphone rising from the poolof glass that was her desk. 'calendar' she commanded. the garden dissolved from the monitor givingway to the page of a calendar scattered with flags and icons, somewhat like a militarymap. a warning message highlighted by a gaudy red bar blinked at the top of the screen anda window popped up: "reminder missed appointment." what appointment could she have missed? hadshe simply neglected to click on reminders early in the week or did her admin screw upagain?
she spoke again in the direction of the viper."go to missed appointment." the screen turned a gray blur; a sound like pouring rain saturatedthe speakers; the calendar software made page turning noises with each traversed week; andthe weeks now whished stormily backwards. in the corner the year was still displayed,but the last digit dropped quickly, three, two one, zero, nine, eight; the second digitalso moved backward though more slowly. 'stop,' secretary abel shouted. the year stoodat 1965; the week was empty of meeting. 'go to missed appointment,' she repeated in annoyance.hand it to microsoft that was one hell of a bug or worse could it be a virus? the furious patter of flipped pages resumed.she watched the slowly receding decade digit,
1950s, 1940s, 1930s; the century was roundedand then 1890s, 1880s, 1870s. 'stop,' she cried again, freezing the year at 1872. 'christ,' she thought, 'maybe it was somethingworse than a bug.' she spoke more loudly and precisely, 'go to missed appointment.' thevertiginious backward sweep resumed. this time she watched in bewildered passivity.it had never occurred to her to wonder, 'how far back do these calendars actually go?'1830s, 1820s, 1780s, 1770s, 1760s; the noise ceased abruptly and a page appearing, appeareddisplaying the week of 10th june 1754 and fixed itself on the screen. a new message appeared, 'missed appointment.should the office assistant schedule a new
one?' in fact several appointments over thecourse of the week were marked as missed. the latest of these on a friday evening flashed.she had enough french to read, 'ball at the residence of monsieur decarzeneau saint-germain-des-pres.'saint-germain-des-pres was a station in the paris metro, that she knew. she had no ideawho monsieur decarzeneau was. she explored nearby entries on the calendarlooking for evidence of a bug in the software. there were so many appointments that it seemedas though somebody else's life had been accidentally grafted into an unlikely part of her calendar. 'this was like finding a hidden passagewayin an old house,' she thought. 'rather fun, actually.'
it soon became clear why the ball along withmany other social engagements had been missed. it appeared that the owner of this portionof the calendar had become bedridden with a long illness. the ministrations of a doctordachmoi and a doctor parre had began in april of 1754. they'd progressed from regular tofrequent over the course of may. by the beginning of june, these doctors were in constant attendance. had secretary abel's historical medical frenchbeen richer she would have deciphered descriptions of a vigorous regimen of cupping, bleedings,and the administration of poisonous metals. these medical rigors culminated on the 15thof june when the patient had her last appointment in the book. this was annotated 'la mort',death. the 15th of june she observed was her
birthday. the fun took an unnerving turn. she went further back; there were dozens oftrivial engagements which seemed vaguely but impalpably to trigger memories. then on the18th of december 1730 there was aunt jean's funeral. could she remember the day, the weather?was the low hanging gray sky a post-dated symbolic trick of memory? her sister to whom she hadn't spoken in threeyears called to tell her that aunt jean was dead. two weeks later a lawyer hired by hersister called to tell her that there was a crazed boyfriend of sorts in the picture,and she remembered her disgust at how the word 'boyfriend' was used to describe the80 year old man.
the lawyer was trying to pry the old woman'slegacy away from this interloper. the boyfriend wanted to funnel it to a church. times had been difficult in these early dayswhen she was getting her master's degree. the aunt had been a wealthy widow, a fragileoctogenarian. even while her aunt was living, she had neverbeen entirely successful fending off daydreams of an inheritance. she almost never saw theold woman who refused to leave the bronx where helen herself certainly wasn't gonna go. the aunt had sent fifty dollar checks in garishgreeting cards on helen's birthday and on holidays. helen had always sent back dutifulthank yous. she simply hadn't noticed that
nothing had come from aunt jean for a yearand a half. her sister having gone to clean out the apartmentand called her again. the old woman it turned out had been a miser and a packrat and hadlived in squalor. the apartment was a morass of burned out light bulbs, moldy wallpaper,broken radiators, crumbling plaster, heaps of old newspaper waiting to catch fire, miceand tattered doilies, amid a miasma of dust, furniture polish and urine. helen had felt unspeakably guilty and hadpalliated her guilt by telling herself that the old woman had never asked for her help. the calendar, however, made a firmer accusation.in a matter of fact way, like a reminder for
a lunch appointment, which it was, the entryread, 'poisoning of aunt jean.' 'no,' she protested out loud. 'no, i know what thatmeans. that's a lie.' she shook her head. 'it wasn't my fault,' she said to herself.'if she'd ever asked for help ever, i would have helped her.' she dug angrily deeper into the calendar.what other accusations were there? she read and reread the calendar entries trying toferret out all of the secret correspondences. if a history of the grand dame matched herown, then she had only two more years to live. her antecedent had died at the age of 49. her meeting was beginning in a matter of minutes.bewildered and exhausted and paying little
attention to what she was doing, she madeher way back to her own era. instead of keying the current date into thecomputer, she held down the forward arrow key with her index finger. the weeks advanced;the years hastened by, 1750s, 1760s, 1770s, 1780s. she traversed the blank corridors devoidof appointments of the late 18th, the 19th, the early and mid-20th century. from auntjean's funeral and the balls, fetes and deaths, back to her own epic. rounding her birthday in the year 1970 shecame upon the following entry: 'an. 1970 - an. 1754 = 215 = 63 hic incipit saeclumvitae novum. [here begins a new cycle of life.] reincarnate.'"
[sound of pages turning] attacks like this against secretary abel multiplyas the story gathers pace. there are strange references to reincarnation, numerology, likethe game here with dates that helen abel came across, and vegetarianism. the attacks becomeso serious and widespread that the national security agency gets involved. and what dothey find? they trace the attacks to what seems to bea cult of followers of the ancient philosopher pythagoras who was active in the sixth centuryb.c. so you see a, a bust of him here. now we tend to think of pythagoras as thefellow who discovered the pythagorean theorem which, which in fact he probably didn't, butyou'll remember we learn about this theorem
in school; it's a theorem about right triangles.you see it here; a2 + b2 = c2. but pythagoras was actually much, much morethan just a small torment to junior high school students. he really was a philosopher in thebroadest sense of the word. and in fact he's even credited with coining the very word "philosophy." he and his followers created one of the earliestnotions of a political utopia and actually seized control of a city in southern italyto try to realize this, this vision. but getting back to mathematics. it was avery strange affair in pythagoras' day. it was in many ways more like sorcery than science.we don't have a terribly accurate picture of what pythagoras and his followers werelike, but in some ways they weren't all that
different from the people you might come acrosssay across the bay in berkeley. for instance, they were probably vegetarian;they believed in reincarnation. in fact they believed in transmigration of souls; thisidea that you might die and wake up a cow or a house cat. and they wore unusual clothing.pythagoras, for instance, wore a white robe and a gold diadem. and pythagoras himselfmay actually have claimed to be an incarnation of the god apollo. they had other habits we can't begin to understandand probably never will. some of their maxims have come down to us. some are sensible, likefor instance, one of their maxims was "eat not in the chariot." in other words, don'teat while you're driving. others are just
weird and foreign, particularly if you'revegetarian, like keep away from the vinegar bottle; an inscrutable one that. they considered it a crime to throw stonesinto fountains and they said, "no matter you do, don't ever, ever catch a cuttlefish."really strange stuff. but one thing they believed in makes thema lot like us, given how our world is pervaded by computing. in particular, they believedabove all in the primacy of number. they believed that numbers were the fabric of the universeand they believed this in a way that resonates particularly well in our digital world. so this idea about the supremacy of numberwas encapsulated in a sacred symbol for the
pythagoreans called the tetraktys; you seeit up here. the tetra part as you may have guessed meansfour. there's really no good translation for the full word 'tetraktys', perhaps the besttranslation is something like the essence of fourness. anyway you see it's a pyramid of ten dotsaligned in four rows. this one symbol for the pythagoreans embodied the foundationsof the universe. so let's start with music, for instance. wenumber the rows as here. and now look at the ratios that those numberings define; the threedifferent ratios defined by the tetraktys. well, let's start with a ratio 1:2. if youtake a string and pluck it; let's suppose
it produces the note c; and then you takethat string and you exactly double its length, you'll again get the note c, only it willbe one octave lower. so the ratio 1:2 in the tetraktys defines the octave. similarly the ratio 2:3 defines the intervalof a fifth; roughly speaking that's a span of five keys on the piano. and 3:4 definesan interval of a fourth; roughly a span of four keys on the piano. that's in a, a differentlytempered world but i won't get into that. so with this reasoning the tetraktys encapsulatedthe basics of, of music and consequently the idea of the harmony of the spheres; the resonantsubstance of the cosmos, the universe. the tetraktys also encapsulates the basicsof geometry and i'll just go through this
very quickly. the first row is, is a point; zero dimensions.the second row contains two dots; you connect them you get a line; that's one dimension.the third row contains three, they form a triangle; two dimensions. and the fourth containsfour dots; if you connect them up like this you get a pyramid; three dimensions. so all of the known dimensions of our universe,the ones that we experience at any rate, are encapsulated in the tetraktys. so you canthink of the tetraktys as being a little like our periodic chart in chemistry or perhapseven a little like string theory, only much cruder and, and much more powerful.
so the pythagoreans are the villains in ourstory, if they really are villains, which isn't at all clear. now of course the nationalsecurity agency isn't accustomed to dealing with incarnations of the god apollo, so theybring in an un, unusual young man named ambrose jerusalem. ambrose is finishing up his doctorate in computerscience just across the bay in, in berkeley, but he's unusual in that he was home schooledby his father, a classical archeologist. a really intense guy who would even taste thedirt and artifacts to make sure that they were authentic. ambrose is exactly what the nsa needs becausehe straddles these two worlds; the worlds
of computer science and antiquity. to give you a sense of what ambrose is like,i'm gonna read another passage. this is a passage in which ambrose has been approachedby the nsa, and he's remembering the things that his father told him when he was a child;the things about pythagoras in particular. and again i've truncated the, the chaptersomewhat here. "outside of the two crowded tourist seasons—midsummer,and a space of two weeks around the peak of the fall foliage—dorington was a picture-bookspecimen of rural new england. even as natives of the region, if not the town, dr. jerusalemand his nine-year-old son felt a sense, a heightened sense of charm as they walked adirt road away from the town center. the town
consisted of a clutch of white, wooden buildings:a clapboard post office, a general store, and a patterned new england church with asingle steeple atop a square base.â (savoring the irony, dr. jerusalem pointed out thatsuch churches were modeled on the architectural template of an english catholic.)the ground was still sodden in late afternoon. the trees turned forth cold, luxuriant greenerytouched here and there with hints of autumn. ambrose’s photojournalist’s vest—hisfavorite piece of clothing, with the pockets of the many treasures—was just warm enough.the bleak weather seemed to embalm the isolated houses in a way that brought a cozy pleasureto him. there could be no vain scrambling to find one’s destiny, here. it lay notmore than five feet from the fireplace, as
in ancient years. his father frequently setambrose ruminating on civilizations tens of centuries old, on the frenetically unfolding,spreading, and splintering empires of the mediterranean. several times together theyhad visited archaeological sites. now, as then ambrose ran his mind over the tracesof antiquity. the jewelweed and blank yellow and copper leaves scattered on the forestfloor, the broken stone walls and raw timber of old buildings evoked, if they did not resemble,the altars and groves of ancient greece or italy.they approached the edge of a pasture enclosed in wire, in which horses grazed. dr. jerusalembounced the back of his hand on the top wire, the ends of which stretched between whiteplastic cylinders on wooden posts. 'not electrified,'
he said. a dappled gray horse came over tothem, and dr. jerusalem stroked it under the forelock. the animal awkwardly tilted itshead up and down, as if unsure how to nod approval and enjoy the scratching at the sametime. dr. jerusalem encouraged ambrose to pat the horse’s head.ambrose said, 'it's an intelligent horse.' 'yes she is. a beautiful mare,' his fatherreplied stroking her head. 'there's soul in those eyes.' 'maybe there's a person trapped in the horselike in the story i read by apuleius. he was turned into an ass though. that's like a donkey.' dr. jerusalem laughed, 'yes, so maybe thisis some russian empress who according to the
great wheels of cosmic justice was reincarnatedas a mare.' he chuckled at his private joke. 'reminds me of xenophanes' story about pythagorasand the dog. have i ever told it to you?' 'i don't think so,' ambrose said seriously.'pythagoras was the ancient philosopher who coined the word "philosophy." he also invented—orat least popularized—the pythagorean theorem. yes, i know you know that already. well, thepythagoreans thought of numbers a little like we might think of gods. pythagoras himselfwas a bit of a loon.' 'how?' ambrose asked in surprise.'well, one story goes like this: he was walking down the street in kroton—in southern italy—oneday, when he saw a man kicking a dog. normally, this wouldn’t have bothered anyone in theancient greek world. but pythagoras was different.
"stop," he shouted at the rogue. "stop thatat once! this dog is a friend!" pythagoras explained that the dog was a reincarnatedfriend from a previous life. he recognized him by his bark.''did he take the dog home?' 'a very good question. but that’s the wholestory. my guess is that pythagoras had probably collected too many friends at home as it was,and i doubt his wife appreciated it—although theano herself was also a formidable philosopher.i’m sure the dog kicker was stunned, and left his dog alone for at least a few days.''how cruel!' said ambrose. 'pythagoras should have taken the dog home with him. is thatwhy he didn't eat animals?' 'you mean why he was vegetarian?'
'yes.''that may be a myth. but almost everything about pythagoras is a myth, ambrose. all weknow with anything approaching certainty is that he was some kind of genius—and thathe abstained from eating beans and ox hearts. it’s not impossible that he was a vegetarian,though.' father and son fell silent. an old pickuptruck with a wood-railed cargo space drove by, forcing ambrose and his father to theedge of the road. damp, colored leaves glistened on the forest floor like the shiny coat ofan exotic, broad-backed creature. ambrose mused, 'i wonder whether i’d remember ifi’d been a horse in another life.' 'do you?' dr. jerusalem asked. 'what wouldyou remember?'
'i don't know. maybe my pasture. and peoplepetting me. and how hay tastes.' 'i've raised a confirmed pythagorean then.do you know the pythagoreans tried more or less just that?' 'what do you mean?' 'they used to perform exercises to improvetheir memories. every evening, ambrose, they would try to recall all of the events thathad occurred over the course of the day. imagine it. they’d try to recollect finer and finerdetails: faces, clothing, what they ate, whom they saw. a word that a friend deftly pulledout of a hat in a conversation on philosophic doctrine in the morning. an odor that waftedwith the midday breeze near the western entrance
to the agora. variations in the shapes ofthe clouds during the afternoon before a storm broke. how the texture of their tunics feltfrom hour to hour. then they’d try to extend their recollections to more and more distanttimes: previous days, weeks, and years. they hoped, eventually—they claimed in certaincases, as pythagoras did—to recall events from former lives.'again they walked for a long time in silence. the sun set and the sky began to glow. ambrosetried forcing on himself a consciousness of the texture of his clothing. he attuned himselfto the places where it touched, brushed, or lay lightly on his skin. he felt his stomachrumble. as he turned his attention upward to the orange evening sky, he felt a ghostlyattraction to the place—or rather, its tutelary
spirit—a desire to embrace it, to sleepby its side. he didn’t know what this meant, and he could not articulate it. he could onlyexperience the bagful of sensations and submit to a feeling that was too grand and tenuous,predicated too glimmeringly on a slant of light, for him to possess.he felt as if his father would glibly discouraging something important. but he had no way toprotest. 'so do you think the feelings are lies? arethey bad?' 'no, not bad, ambrose. quite the opposite.they're too important to be badly handled. the successors to the pythagoreans went wrong.they tried to reduce them to a superstitious system, to explain these poetic and highlyindividual experiences in terms of a simplistic
universal, like reincarnation or numbers.i can’t prove it, but the original pythagoreans to my mind clearly believed in living in theworld. memory—historical, personal—of course it's the substance of life. withoutthat depth of perception, we’re cyclopes, one-eyed monsters. but today we replace ourhuman memories with computer memories, with exomemories and exominds. that spells thedeath of nostalgia, the loosening of the deep cord with which an ancient ruin or this spotof countryside resonates in you, ambrose. recall that "memory" in greek was the motherof the muses.' 'i know.''the world is placing less and less value on such things. fewer and fewer people withmemory these days. memory has been shunted
off to a nursing home. the muses will followsoon. i have you learn poetry by heart to nourish your spirit and your mind—to glueit to your soul, ambrose. that’s just one reason i’m educating you yourself. do youunderstand?' 'i think so.' 'do you know the famous poem by frost aboutthe two paths that "diverged in a yellow wood"? the pythagoreans called it the furca pythagorica,the pythagorean fork. they represented it by the letter upsilon. upsilon resembles ourcapital letter y, right? it’s forked. you will face the furca pythagorica many timesin your life, ambrose. i’ve led you down a different branch of the fork than nearlyanyone else will follow.'
ambrose looked at the road behind them whichlay straight as far as the eye could see. he held up two fingers as though in a signof victory. 'what happened to them?' he asked. 'to thepythagoreans? they chose the wrong branch?' 'the pythagoreans were the original utopians,ambrose. bringers of the gods’ fire to earth, if you will. the first aristocrats in thetrue sense of the word. i don’t mean lazy snobs from privileged families with a ‘de’or ‘von’ in their names. just the opposite. i mean that they tried to create a communityof aristoi, the ‘best’—noble, wise, elect guardians of civilization. it was toomuch. most of pythagoras’s followers couldn’t understand. pythagoras had unearthly mentalgifts and vision. he was strange; he was godlike.
some of his early followers forgot what theylearned. plato, augustine, more, jefferson—they all owed a debt to pythagoras. they rememberedsome of the important teachings. but too many have forgotten.'dr. jerusalem stopped and put his hand on ambrose’s shoulder. 'i sometimes lose sightof how young you are. but this is one of the burdens i'll have to place on your shoulders.we’ll make sure that you don’t forget entirely. you’ll be rooted in other timesand places. it 's the only way to understand your own. you’ll be one of the last withthe gift of a classically educated mind, ambrose. the barbarians are again sweeping over theland, and it’s time to retreat to hibernia—to bide our time across the sea. perhaps thearistoi will come again. but perhaps you’ll
be alone.'[pause] now where does the mathematical view of thepythagoreans come together with modern cryptology? in other words, why is ambrose at the rightintersection of ideas? the nsa believes that the cult of pythagoreanshas used its mathematical prowess to break a cryptographic algorithm known as rsa; manyof you are probably familiar with it. named after its inventors at mit in 1977, rivest,shamir and adleman. here's a picture dating from that decade obviously. some of you willsee a nice little joke on the blackboard there. most of you in this audience probably knowthat rsa is a real algorithm used in nearly every computing system in the world today.it operates, for instance, when you send your
credit card information over the internetand a little lock appears in the corner of your browser, as, as here. so breaking rsa would compromise computingsystems in a devastating way. it would basically undermine the whole trust infrastructure ofthe internet. in fact at this very moment about a mile away at the moscone center, thersa conference is taking place. this is a huge industry conference staged every yearby the company rsa, and rivest, shamir and adleman are probably there at this, this verymoment. now you see here the basic formula; one ofthem for rsa m = cd mod pq. it looks a little likee=mc2, right? it's got the same sort of simplicity
and, and elegance. now the pythagoreans believed in the powerof a very particular type of mathematics, based on integers. and closest in spirit towhat we would call number theory today. mathematicians who specialized in this area used to pridethemselves on studying the most useless form of math. they believed that their disciplineenjoyed a kind of peerless intellectual purity. we know that calculus is useful, but theyasked themselves, "what possible use could there be for things like prime numbers?" well pythagorean ideas about numbers and theirsupremacy; all this numerological gobblygook seems little silly at first blush, but pythagoreanswere even writing prayers to numbers like
their tetraktys. but the earth shook underthe feet of those number theorists a few decades ago. prime numbers suddenly found a use; protectingsecrets, cryptology. so these number theorists found themselveswhisked away from their ivory towers into the fortress of the nsa. now ambrose realizes that as computing gravitatestoward the center of our universe and cryptography spreads, the whole pythagorean idea of prowessin number theory, of secrecy and so forth, doesn't seem so far off base any longer. pythagorassaid famously that the universe is number and he meant it in a mystical way. well cryptologydirectly links the knowledge of numbers with the unraveling of secrets and control of whatwe might even think of as divine forces, in
a loose sense. so it gives body to the mysticism. as many of you know, to break the rsa algorithmall you have to do is solve the following very simple problem. i randomly picked twonumbers, call them p and q. i generate them behind my back and i multiply them behindmy back. now these are prime numbers; they're divisible only by themselves and one, as,as many of you know. so we'll call the product of these two integersn. so now what i do is i give you n and your task is to figure out the original p and q,as it were to split this number n. when p and q are very big, and so thereforewhen n is very big, this problem is believed to be very hard; and by big i mean reallybig. here's, here's an example of what n might
look like in the real world. so this is the cornerstone of the rsa algorithm;this problem of factoring as it's called. and this is the problem that the nsa thinksthat the pythagoreans have solved in order to crack the rsa algorithm. as the story gathers pace, messages like theone that secretary abel came across multiplied. other powerful people start to be menaced.so how do ambrose and the nsa sleuth out the identities of the pythagoreans? they use anumber of techniques: there's classical scholarship; there's gumshoe sleuthing; and computer forensicsalso come into play. so let me read a last bit from the book. this,this bit needs a little bit of explanation.
the messages left by the pythagoreans likethe one left for secretary abel have been essentially flawless, but ambrose and thensa noticed a typo in one of them. in one message the word "syracuse," like the nameof the town in upstate new york, which is also the name of an, a city in the ancientworld, greek city, is misspelled. somehow the letter "e" dropped off the end and theyended up with syracus instead of syracuse. it's a tiny, tiny clue, but it turns out tobe critical. so in this passage there's a conversationtaking place between ambrose and rochelle his supervisor at the nsa. "ambrose prepared another list of books andthey again sent out to the library. in the
meantime he read about the history of huronand the city of syracuse extracting what he could from the reference books on hand. rochellesearched the web to learn some rudiments. 'look here. i found a portrait,' she announced,swiveling her monitor to show ambrose photographs of the two sides of a silver coin on auction.the reverse depicted a galloping cavalryman carrying a sphere. the obverse showed a beardlessman in profile with a prominent round chin and a small ear; his curly mass of hair boundin a slender band tied from behind. 'he looks young for a king.' 'that's thanks to alexander the great. hestarted the vogue in boyish looks for conquerors.' 'apart from that,' rochelle said, 'every websitehas the same historical snippet on huron.
nothing more than you told me. any luck onyour end?' 'no. not yet.' 'really, ambrose. are we chasing our tails?can one letter really mean all that much anyway? syracuse, syracus. is it really such a bigdeal? couldn't it just be a spelling error or a typo?' 'it could be a typo. in that case it may notmean much, but every other piece of writing we've seen from the neo-pythagoreans or thati have at least, has been more or less flawless.' 'true. but a typo?' 'that doesn't answer your question, does it?'
'can a single letter be important?' 'yes, absolutely.' 'there's a town in northern italy called cortona.ancient tradition asserts that the tomb of pythagoras lies there. but pythagoras probablynever visited northern italy. it was a mistake. somebody confused cortona with cratona, thelatin name for the city of crotone in southern italy.' 'in classical literature these little errorsare everything. for example, the original name of the author the aeneid was vergil,that's spelled v-e, but then in the middle ages when he was believed to be a magicianof some kind, it became virgil, v-i. you can
tell a brit from an american by his spelling.for instance, the brit spells it v-e, while the american spells it v-i. where it gets especially interesting is inmedieval manuscripts. everyone has spelling errors and they're like differences in dna;they mark time and pedigree and they allow philologists to date manuscripts and placethem at a kind of family tree.' 'so you're hoping that this missing "e" maybe our key dna marker? was syracuse every spelled syracus by the greeks?' 'no. i've looked it up in little and scott.there were several variance on the name in greek, the ionian syracusi,' ambrose said.he continued, 'and also the doric and others.
i'm pretty sure that syracus is the moderngerman spelling, but i just can't see any reason for writing syracus in english.' 'i see. so to put it in your terms, the wordsyracus is a mutation of some kind.' 'well, yes,' ambrose replied. 'i suppose youcould say that.' 'but that makes it distinctive, you see?'" the nsa ends up plunging into various typesof computer forensics to figure all of this out and actually a remarkable thing happenedwhile i was writing this story. i was making up certain forensic techniques in tetraktysto track down the pythagoreans as it were, when this patent suddenly surfaced describingexactly the techniques i was developing in
this fictional context. only i hadn't filedthat patent; it was the nsa. so it's just one of these wonderful coincidences i guessi, i happened to, to divine what the, what the nsa was up to as i was writing this story. as the story evolves, the pythagoreans graduallyinfiltrate many parts of the world online and off. lottery numbers get changed; airlineschedules are modified; and some great event seems to be coming to a head. but it's not clear whether the pythagoreansare a malevolent or benign force. after all these are the people who tried to establishutopia many years ago; the bringing a certain beauty to the world and reviving classicalideals.
ambrose as you can imagine with his background,has a yearning for these things. so he has to grapple with what's real and what's not.and whether he may be working for the nsa to try to hunt down and destroy a group thatmay be older and wiser than we are and could bring a certain order and moral force to theworld. so who are these pythagoreans and how do theybreak the rsa algorithm? and what does ancient greece tell us about our own evolving digitalworld and authenticity? these, these are the questions at the heartof 'tetraktys'. so i hope that after hearing me speak today,you'll accept my invitation to join ambrose on his, on his journey and explore the mystery.
thank you very much. steve: if you have questions, please use themic in the middle of the room. male voice in audience: this is a somewhatstandard question for people who have very, very busy schedules and pretty big day jobs.how were you able to carve out time to, to welcome your muse? ari juels: that's a, that's a great question. so the first answer is that it took me over10 years to write the book. the second answer is that to some extent idon't remember and i often wonder in fact if i just happened to encounter some genie;picked up a bottle on the beach or something
and made a deal. i said "okay, you can erase10 years of my life if a book will just pop out." and, and that happened. because i reallydon't have a strong recollection of how on earth i squeezed my writing time in. male voice in audience: in your book you referencethe nsa and the interactions there and in the panel you'd chaired earlier this weekat the rsa conference. there's a really interesting cultural contrast between the representativefrom the nsa and the other members of the panel. how does that, what is your characterizationof the nsa culture and how does that play out in terms of the book? is that, is thata part of the book or is that really secondary?
ari juels: well, i don't have intimate knowledgeof the culture of the nsa, of course very few people outside the nsa do. so to someextent i, i had to try to make guesses. as i mentioned, i made at least one happy technicalguess. i don't know whether the cultural guesses that i made were accurate. some of the elements of the book are, arecertainly farfetched, but there, there certainly is a sharp difference between the academicperspective and the, and the nsa perspective. and i think the little that i know has probablypercolated into the book, but i'm not sure i can give you a crisp characterization. female voice in audience: thank you, ari.
ari juels: okay. thank you very much.