A novel approach to RSA cryptosystem

The first several-hour study session for an impending midterm is not as much a walk through memory lane as it is a misguided crawl.

What I mean by this is that many of the things one hazily remembers about a course are trivial and many of the things one completely forgets are essential. Thus, broken strings of memories about exceptions to rules and unintentionally comedic questions (“So the derivative of the velocity of money is acceleration, correct?”) hampers any progression toward total recall of material. Even if one does somehow remember everything covered in lecture, there is the necessarily tedious process of bridging neural synapses in order to connect Information Set A to Information Set B. The whole enterprise never ceases to be annoying.

So frustrating is the process that it often leads to extended musings about the unimportance of grades in the grand scheme of things. Undoubtedly a defensive mechanism, these meditations generally involve successful college dropouts Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerman and Kanye West. Phrases like “Internet start-up company” and “take some time off” also figure prominently.

I found myself in a similarly fanciful state when I came across the heading “RSA Cryptosystem” while studying for a mathematics midterm. What followed on the page was an unseemly mess of technical jargon about cryptography, prime numbers, multiplicative inverses and the Chinese Remainder theorem. As per usual, I skimmed the entire page until I found a sentence in English: “Nobody knows how to factor large integers efficiently.” A novel idea was born.

Figure out how to factor 10^9,999 quickly and sell the idea for more than the hypothetical monetary value of all my midterms.

Surprisingly enough, I’ve actually hatched several variations of this plan since middle school. All of these schemes more or less involve answering a question no one knows the answer to, deriving a gigantic lump sum from the solution and then quitting school. The major flaw in the plan is that the inception of each one inevitably occurs near a test of grade-breaking magnitude, so I never have enough time to properly consider nuclear fusion, electron clouds and the quantum field theory. Alas.

Every student is in some sense familiar with this quandary. You come across something legitimately compelling in the course of studying for a test or working on a problem set, but decide to be pragmatic and not harp on it. An abundance of intriguing stuff in academia never really garners our attention because it’s not an important part of survey courses. In fact, most of the big (and, transitively, unsolved) questions in the popular fields aren’t even approached at the undergraduate level because, presumably, they’re deemed too complex for non-experts.

These pursuits are saved for graduate school or careers in research. In exceptional cases, an undergraduate working with a faculty member may legitimately assist—meaning, offer value beyond data entry or coffee supply—his or her field in expanding its body of knowledge. Unfortunately, the crude reality is that most of us will spend four years answering questions that have already been answered thousands of times by our predecessors. Midterm week, more so than other weeks of the year, is perhaps the most depressing reminder that success—at least, for the science and math inclined—is more often than not reproducing knowledge than creating it.