Similarly, it was taught in an advanced discrete math course at the

Since no one else has mentioned it...the NSA tried to head off the original publication of public key cryptography, threatening star chambers, national security directives, and jail terms. This was thwarted by profs at a hundred colleges across the U.S. immediately assigning the algorithm as homework to every software class they were teaching at the same time, thus rather letting the cat out of the bag. The NSA then backed off, and publications followed. The material has been a natural part of certain courses ever since, depending on tastes of the prof. Part of the above story I experienced directly, since I was at Berkeley at the time, and other parts I heard from Ralph Merkle, who was either still there or had just gone to Stanford...I can't recall which. So if someone is collecting stories about the commonality of teaching such things, I imagine there must be some hundreds of thousands of eye witness reports. I implemented a 512 bit pubkey algorithm for kicks on a Z80 CPM system around 1982 based on a paper in the open literature that aimed at non-mathematicians and gave details such as efficient GCD algorithms. There cannot be any question about how widely known these techniques are. Doug