Optimization is by far one of the richest ways to apply computer science and mathematics to the real world. Everybody is looking to optimize something: companies want to maximize profits, factories want to maximize efficiency, investors want to minimize risk, the list just goes on and on. The mathematical tools for optimization are also some of the richest mathematical techniques.

This post is intended for people with a little bit of programming experience and no prior mathematical background. So let’s talk about numbers. Numbers are curious things. On one hand, they represent one of the most natural things known to humans, which is quantity.

Graphs are among the most interesting and useful objects in mathematics. Any situation or idea that can be described by objects with connections is a graph, and one of the most prominent examples of a real-world graph that one can come up with is a social network.

In a previous post we introduced a learning model called Probably Approximately Correct (PAC). We saw an example of a concept class that was easy to learn: intervals on the real line (and more generally, if you did the exercise, axis-aligned rectangles in a fixed dimension). One of the primary goals of studying models of learning is to figure out what is learnable and what is not learnable in the various models.

Last time we saw the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol, and discussed the discrete logarithm problem and the related Diffie-Hellman problem, which form the foundation for the security of most protocols that use elliptic curves. Let’s continue our journey to investigate some more protocols. Just as a reminder, the Python implementations of these protocols are not at all meant for practical use, but for learning purposes.

Here is a fun puzzle. Suppose we have a group of 10 men and 10 women, and each of the men has sorted the women in order of their preference for marriage (that is, a man prefers to marry a woman earlier in his list over a woman later in the list). Likewise, each of the women has sorted the men in order of marriageability. We might ask if there is any way that we, the omniscient cupids of love, can decide who should marry to make everyone happy.

So far in this series we’ve seen elliptic curves from many perspectives, including the elementary, algebraic, and programmatic ones. We implemented finite field arithmetic and connected it to our elliptic curve code. So we’re in a perfect position to feast on the main course: how do we use elliptic curves to actually do cryptography?

So here we are. We’ve studied the general properties of elliptic curves, written a program for elliptic curve arithmetic over the rational numbers, and taken a long detour to get some familiarity with finite fields (the mathematical background and a program that implements arbitrary finite field arithmetic). And now we want to get back on track and hook our elliptic curve program up with our finite field program to make everything work.

Two years ago, Erik Demaine and three other researchers published a fun paper to the arXiv proving that most incarnations of classic nintendo games are NP-hard. This includes almost every Super Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, and Pokemon title. Back then I wrote a blog post summarizing the technical aspects of their work, and even gave a talk on it to a room full of curious undergraduate math majors.

Back when I was first exposed to programming language design, I decided it would be really cool if there were a language that let you define your own number types and then do all your programming within those number types.