🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BzvAs7.sI@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>, hrubin@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
> RSA may seem miraculous to those who do not know mathematics, but not to
> those who do; I suspect the Patent Office to be staffed by those in the
> former class.  A BS in mathematics does not mean knowing much, if any,
> non-computational mathematics, and certainly not the number theory and
> knowledge of computational complexity needed to appreciate what has been
> done by the promoters.  As a professor for a long time, I must question if
> many are really "skilled in the art", as the patent laws put it.

I fail to see your point.  Are you claiming that RSA was obvious?
I suggest you read

@article{Diffie88,
   author = {Whitfield Diffie},
   journal = {Proceedings of the IEEE},
   month = {May},
   number = {5},
   pages = {560--577},
   title = {The First Ten Years of Public Key Cryptography},
   volume = {76},
   year = {1988}
}

Believe me, it wasn't obvious to a lot of smart *and* educated people.

Yes, RSA is eminently comprehensible now, almost obvious, one would say.
Lots of brilliant inventions are obvious in retrospect.  So what?

To my way of thinking, RSA is about the best example there is of why
``software'' patents should be valid.  Apart from the technicality that
it can be (and often is) implemented in hardware, we have something that's
new (that factoring is difficult isn't new -- but a practical use is),
useful (or we'd be discussing this in sci.math, not sci.crypt), and
very definitely non-obvious.