Author Archives: apgoucher

One-way permutations are fascinating functions that possess a paradoxical pair of properties. They are efficiently computable functions φ from [n] := {0, 1, …, n−1} to itself that are: Mathematically invertible, meaning that φ is a bijection; Cryptographically uninvertible, meaning … Continue reading →

The nth cyclotomic field is the field generated by a primitive nth root of unity, ζ. It is an example of a number field, consisting of algebraic numbers, and its dimension is φ(n) when regarded as a vector space over … Continue reading →

The three months since the last cp4space article have largely been spent learning about an interesting project called Urbit. My attention was drawn to its existence during a talk by Riva-Melissa Tez (formerly of Intel) on the importance of continued … Continue reading →

Previously, we discussed which regular polytopes have vertex-sets that occur as proper subsets of the vertex-set of another regular polytope in the same dimension. In particular, when there is a Hadamard matrix of order 4k, then then the (4k−1)-dimensional simplex … Continue reading →

This is a digest of things that have happened this month, but which are individually too small to each warrant a separate cp4space post. Firstly, there have been a couple of exciting results in the field of combinatorics: The Erdős-Faber-Lovász … Continue reading →

There are two competing notions for describing a subset of the real numbers as being ‘small’: a null set is a subset of the reals with Lebesgue measure zero; a meagre set is a countable union of nowhere-dense sets. Both … Continue reading →

In January 2000, Erich Friedman considered the problem of finding a rigid unit-distance graph G containing a regular heptagon as a subgraph. That is to say, the graph is immersed in the plane such that: every edge of G must … Continue reading →

There’s a very elegant cryptographic construction discovered by Barreto and Naehrig in a 2005 paper. It is beautiful from a pure mathematical perspective, but also has an impressive application: it was* part of the ingenious mechanism by which Zcash supports … Continue reading →