Simon Singh is a science writer who covers cryptography, mathematics, and cosmology, and his site hosts cipher tutorials and info on his books.
HN commenters repeatedly recommend his books, especially The Code Book and Fermat's Last Theorem, as captivating and easy reading on crypto history.
Not the OP, but I'm guessing that Syzygies is Professor David Allen Bayer. [0][1]
>Bayer was a mathematics consultant for the film A Beautiful Mind, the biopic of John Nash,
"Syzygies" appears to be a reference to a construct in abstract algebra. [2][3]
Dave Bayer is referenced on the version of the Wikipedia page Erdős–Bacon number dated 03:25, 9 February 2013. [4]
>For a time, the person with the lowest known Erdős–Bacon number was Dave Bayer, mathematical consultant to A Beautiful Mind who was on screen in a minor role in the movie. Rance Howard was also in A Beautiful Mind and in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon to give Bayer a Bacon number of 2. Bayer wrote a paper with Persi Diaconis, who has an Erdős number of 1 due to a jointly authored 1977 Stanford University technical report, later published in a 2004 compilation. As such, Bayer's Erdős–Bacon number is 4. ...
But there is a tsunami of deletions [5] by Wikipedia User:Cresix [6] on that day, and the text above plus a table that references Dave Bayer is gone.
[0] https://simonsingh.net/media/articles/maths-and-science/erdos-bacon-numbers/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Bayer
[2] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/papers/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_syzygy_theorem
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_number&oldid=537328352
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_number&offset=20130209091114&action=history
[6]…
Two mathematicians are in a bar. The first one says to the second that the average person knows very little about basic mathematics. The second one disagrees, and claims that most people can cope with a reasonable amount of mathematics.
The first mathematician goes off to the washroom, and in his absence the second calls over the waitress. He tells her that in a few minutes, after his friend has returned, he will call her over and ask her a question. All she has to do is answer “one third x cubed.”
She repeats “one thir — dex cue”?
He repeats, “one third x cubed”.
She asks, “one thir dex cubed?”
“Yes, that’s right,” he says.
So she agrees, and goes off mumbling to herself,
“one thir dex cubed…”.
The first guy returns and the second proposes a bet to prove his point, that most people do know something
about basic mathematics. He says he will ask the blonde waitress an integral, and the first laughingly agrees. The second man calls over the waitress and asks “what is the integral of x squared?”.
The waitress says “one third x cubed” and whilst walking away,
turns back and says over her shoulder “plus a constant!”
https://simonsingh.net/books/fermats-last-theorem/mathematical-and-scientific-joke-competition/
The FBI leads US domestic counterintelligence, so during the Cold War it isn't surprising that someone from a Warsaw Pact country who seems to travel randomly around, moving within (and staying at the homes of!) a group of intelligentsia whose work is foundational for cryptography, hydrodynamics, and celestial mechanics, would have had a fair amount of resources devoted to them.
> All mathematics is divided into three parts: cryptography (paid for by CIA, KGB and the like), hydrodynamics (supported by manufacturers of atomic submarines) and celestial mechanics (financed by military and other institutions dealing with missiles, such as NASA). —VIA
(Pedantry: the FBI also does some drugs stuff, but Erdős would've been way too small for them to bother)
Lagniappe: https://simonsingh.net/books/fermats-last-theorem/wacky-fermat-stuff/devilish-short-story/
I've just finished the Enigma part in the code book by Simon Singh (https://simonsingh.net/books/the-code-book/) and the Polish contribution to decrypting the Enigma communication (based off French intelligence work) is correctly attributed.
There's also a part on how the secret on Enigma's breaking has been kept for decades after the war, supposedly because Enigma machines had been distributed to British colonies (and ex-colonies) and British intelligence wanted to be able to decrypt their communication.
The only problem I have is that the part regarding current encryption are a little outdated. But the rest of the content is good, I've found.
> from spinal cord problems that chiropractors can easily treat
Please no. Chiropractors are mostly pseudo-scientific pretend-doctors that should be allowed anywhere near a nervous system. They are not "back doctors".
In 2021 they're a huge source of anti-vaccine misinformation.
https://simonsingh.net/media/articles/alternative-medicine/beware-the-spinal-trap/
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/chiropractic-neck-adjustments-linked-to-stroke
> Doctors hate this fact and will gladly put people on meds or tell them to change their lifestyle
Hating on doctors is no reason to go see a quack.
Simon Singh's The Code Book[1] is excellent, if around 10 years old:
The Code Book covers diverse historical topics including the Man in the Iron Mask, Arabic cryptography, Charles Babbage, the mechanisation of cryptography, the Enigma machine, and the decryption of Linear B and other ancient writing systems.
Later sections cover the development of public-key cryptography. Some of this material is based on interviews with participants, including persons who worked in secret at GCHQ.[2]
[1] http://simonsingh.net/books/the-code-book/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Code_Book