rant on the morality of confidentiality

[Tim May]

At 3:26 PM -0800 1/8/98, David Miller wrote:
>Tim May wrote:
>
>> Consider Andrew Wiles, Princeton math professor, and the prover of Fermat's
>> Last Theorem. He labored in secrecy for many years, only going public when
>> he felt his results were complete. (As it turned out, they were not, and he
>> needed another year or two to fill in some gaps.)
>
>You may have seen the same TV show I saw on him.  I really enjoyed it.

No, I didn't get my information from television. I presume you mean the
"Nova" show some months back.

>Is there any evidence that he got (ahem) outside funding for his project?
>In the back of my paranoid mind, I wondered that since he was dealing with
>elliptic curves and modular arithmetic if...  I mean, how did he pay his
>mortgage?  The show implied that he was not doing any real teaching most
>of that time, and if no one at the school knew of his work, then where was
>the money coming from?

Why don't you use the Web and report what you find? I'm not inclined to go
out and do this research to answer your questions.

(I just found 800 hits on his name, including biographical material.)

If, by the way, you are surmising that he may've received NSA funding, this
seems dubious. Just because "elliptic functions" are involved....

In any case, his salary was paid by Princeton for most or all of those
years. As he had no equipment to buy, no students to support...his costs
were low.

--Tim May


The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^2,976,221   | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."