This is the most inane thing I’ve read all year. The author speaks a lot about encryption, so I’m surprised she doesn’t seem to grasp how Mahadev’s protocol is essentially a cryptographic one. Would she have believed that public key cryptography was possible prior to its invention? Surprising that its conception essentially hinged on what most people would view as a curio from number theory. Mahadev’s result, in some respects, is the same. Except instead of prime factorization she’s leveraging trap door claw free functions. Arcane? Yes. Cryptographic? Certainly. ‘Encrypted’ in the author’s abuse of the word? Absolutely not.
But in one respect, she’s not wrong. There are examples where academics have published (yea, published) results that few other academics understand, believe, or trust. One occurred in 2012 when the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki published a paper where he claimed proof of the ABC conjecture. It would seem it still hasn’t been accepted by the vast majority of number theorists. Another more recent example occurred when mathematician Michael Atiyah claimed to have solved the Riemann hypothesis in 2018, though I haven’t seen whether he stands by the original proof. These things do happen.
I went to one of Mahadev’s talks at MIT in 2018 and apart from the trapdoor function her work shouldn’t be beyond the ken of someone with a good physics education - the physics she uses is not that hard to understand
3 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 17.0 ms ] threadBut in one respect, she’s not wrong. There are examples where academics have published (yea, published) results that few other academics understand, believe, or trust. One occurred in 2012 when the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki published a paper where he claimed proof of the ABC conjecture. It would seem it still hasn’t been accepted by the vast majority of number theorists. Another more recent example occurred when mathematician Michael Atiyah claimed to have solved the Riemann hypothesis in 2018, though I haven’t seen whether he stands by the original proof. These things do happen.
But Mahadev’s paper is not an example of this.