September 28, 2013 – Dr. Branislav Kisačanin – Did the NSA Really Break the RSA Code?

In this talk we will learn about the art of protecting information, some incredible (but true) stories from the history of cryptography, and how the all-important RSA code works. To get there, we will need a bit of Number Theory, in particular Fermat’s Little Theorem and Euler’s Theorem. In the process we will also learn how to solve a class of problems that might be seen at AMC competitions, such as:

• What is the remainder when 2^1000 is divided by 997?
• Determine the last digit of 1^1 + 2^2 + 3^3 + … + 2009^2009.

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