Rich Schroepell response to Ron Rivest and the RSA paper included a suggestion to name the protagonists Adolf and Bertholt.
"Another literary suggestion: name your protagonists, perhaps Adolf and Bertholt or somesuch. This would reserve isolated letters for mathematical quantities."
Rivest, Shamir and Adleman liked the suggestion and eventually settled on Alice and Bob.
Nobody in the audience thought it was practical but they were a bunch of theoreticians, the funny thing about ‘fundamentals of quantum mechanics’ is that experiments always work as planned…
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 17.2 ms ] thread"Another literary suggestion: name your protagonists, perhaps Adolf and Bertholt or somesuch. This would reserve isolated letters for mathematical quantities."
Rivest, Shamir and Adleman liked the suggestion and eventually settled on Alice and Bob.