1.1-1.2, 3.1-3.2, due on April 2.

What was the most difficult part of the material for you?

Most puzzling to me in sections 1.1 and 1.2 was the idea of a key and how it is used. I get the real life analogy of keys for locks, however, I found myself wondering a lot how is the key used in terms of computers. For now I just see it as this magical number that does something according to the algorithms.

The proofs in section 3.1 pertaining to the prime numbers were hard to follow. However, I intuitively understood why the corollaries were true so it wasn't a big deal.

Also, 3.2 took a while to understand it took a few reads through to even understand what was going on

Reflections:

A lot of introduction information was given in this first readings. I am most interested in seeing and learning the algorithm, specifically, the public key algorithms that solve the problems that can arise in cryptology. I have had some exposure to cryptographic methods and number theory so a lot of this was a refresher on what cryptology accomplishes.

Also, it seems that prime numbers will be useful in the course which is cool cause I really like number theory surrounding prime numbers. Perhaps my favorite proof, though not mentioned in the book, is the proof that there are infinite prime numbers.