From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 1996 12:00:27 +0800
To: Krister Walfridsson <cato@df.lth.se>
Subject: Re: Cryptology and knot theory?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.VUL.3.91.960616003502.25074B-100000@marvin.df.lth.se>
Message-ID: <199606152350.TAA14182@jekyll.piermont.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Krister Walfridsson writes:
>     17.10.3. Ciphers are somewhat like knots...the right sequence of moves
>              unties them, the wrong sequence only makes them more tangled. 
>              ("Knot theory" is becoming a hot topic in math and physics
>              (work of Vaughn Jones, string theory, etc.) and I suspect
>              there are some links between knot theory and crypto.)
>  
> Has any work been done along those lines?
> 
> I did some searches with AltaVista, but I only found Cyphernomicon...

I would have my doubts about how interesting the direction could get,
since knot theory is a dead area. The classification problem was fully
solved, and after that things got boring...

Perry