Colloquium Details
Distinguished Lecture Series - A Cryptic Letter to Thomas Jefferson
| Author: | Lawren Smithline The Center for Communications Research, Princeton |
|---|---|
| Date: | January 26, 2010 |
| Time: | 16:00 |
| Location: | 100 Willamette Hall |
| Host: | Eugene Luks |
Abstract
On Christmas Day, 1801, Thomas Jefferson received a letter from University of Pennsylvania professor Robert Patterson. The last page of the letter was written using the cipher described in the earlier pages, and Patterson withheld the key, writing, "I may safely defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race to decypher [such writing] to the end of time." The first successful cryptanalysis was done by me in 2007.
I will describe Patterson's cipher, its place in history, and its solution.
The cipher manuscript is available from the Library of Congress at
http://memory.loc.gov/master/mss/mtj/mtj1/025/0300/0304.jpg.
Biography
Lawren Smithline received his Ph. D. from University of California, Berkeley, writing a thesis on p-adic modular forms. After several years at Cornell University, and a shift in focus to computational biology, he moved to the Center for Communications Research, where he continues to work on a spectrum of applied and theoretical math problems.
This talk is cosponsored by the Department of Mathematics.