Friday, 16 November 2007

The Magic Words are Squeamish Ossifrage


Here is a rather magnificent looking ossifrage [picture from Wikipedia] (though I don't know whether he's especially squeamish! :)
The connection with factorization?
Well the first ever RSA challenge, posed by Martin Gardner in 1977, had this phrase as its encrypted solution - deciphered in 1994 for the $100 prize:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Words_are_Squeamish_Ossifrage

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