Thanks to Diana for giving me this link.
Blogthings – You Know You’re Addicted to Coding When…
Hahahahaha! LOL You probably won’t get it unless you’re a programmer.
Monthly Archive for February, 2005
Today I found out my scores on the AMC-10 and California Mathematics League.
On the AMC-10 I got 111.5 out of possible 150 points, which is significatly higher than lots of other people in the class (including 8th graders). The other 7th graders (namely Tony, Felix, and Timothy) beat me by a few points, and all the top 8th graders (Steven Liao, Daiwei, Patricia, Archit, etc.) scored close to perfect!
CAML: I only got 36 out of 40. [shy] I won’t get the paper back until 2 weeks later. Something interesting…the contest designers say that anyone with a score of 15 or above is “to be commended”, so I guess that’s everyone in our class! LOL
I wonder what I got on the previous Math FAX? One of the problems asked for “the area of the cylinder, in terms of [tex]pi[/tex]“. Surface area or volume?
On Wednesday I took the Math Olympiads and am 99% sure I got 5/5.
On Thursday I took Continental Math League and I MISSED A PROBLEM! The problem: Calculate AB+BA (base 12) and convert it to base 10. Somehow, I got 275 when it’s actually 273. [tex]AB_{12} + BA_{12} = (10 times 12^1 + 11 times 12^0)+(11 times 12^1 + 10 times 12^0) \ = (120+11)+(132+10) = (131)+(142) = 273!!![/tex] ARGH! I guess I’m not a national leader anymore…:-(
Yesterday I went to the 4th Bay Area Mathematical Adventures for the 2004-2005 school year, at the San Jose State University. Steven G. Krantz was our speaker, and talked to us mainly about RSA encryption. It was pretty interesting, although some parts were hard to understand.
RSA is an encryption scheme that was developed in 1978 by three people: R. Rivest, A. Shamir, and L. Adleman. It’s based around the fact that factoring large numbers takes exponential time for present-day computers, and is not a feasible task.
RSA is a public-key encryption system, which means that you can send a message to someone by using their public key, which is distributed to everyone. Then, to decrypt the message, a private key is needed. This is kept secret, and only the recipient knows this. Therefore, no one else can read the message.
There’s a lot of math involved behind the scenes, and I found that this site explains it pretty well.
RSA is an industry-standard encryption scheme used everywhere–by the government, companies, educational institutions, and even the general public. Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL uses RSA encryption. They may not know it, but when people enter financial data, purchase items online, read email securely, or even use their credit cards at a store, RSA encryption is being employed to protect their sensitive information.