First sentence starts with horrible antisemitism. Can someone fix it? (on my phone with kids so not in a position to)
It's been fixed.
Still up. Looks like this is going to be another game of hit the hedgehog.
Michael Rabin has died
11–20 of 109 posts
Re: Michael Rabin has died
#12Michael O. Rabin had important contributions in many domains, but from a practical point of view the most important are his contributions to cryptography. After Ralph Merkle, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, Michael O. Rabin is the most important of the creators of public-key cryptography. The RSA team (Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman) is better known than Michael O. Rabin, but that is entirely due to…
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Re: Michael Rabin has died
#13Michael O. Rabin had important contributions in many domains, but from a practical point of view the most important are his contributions to cryptography. After Ralph Merkle, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, Michael O. Rabin is the most important of the creators of public-key cryptography. The RSA team (Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman) is better known than Michael O. Rabin, but that is entirely due to…
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This is no AI slop.
On the contrary, you cannot find frequently descriptions about the role of Michael O. Rabin in the creation of public-key cryptography, so few people are aware of it and I bet that no AI model can generate any text even remotely resembling this, because this information cannot be found in any single place in the possible training texts.
You can find definitions of secure hash functions everywhere, but pretty much nowhere you will find who are the authors of the conditions that are used in the modern definition and who have introduced the use of one-way hash functions.
I did not find this information anywhere, before reading the original publications of Rabin and Merkle from 1978/1979 and some later follow-up papers written by them.
You will not find this historical information in Wikipedia and I believe that it is important to know who are the true authors of the things that one uses daily. Connecting to this site or to any other site with https uses digital signatures that depend on the collision-resistant hash functions defined by Rabin and Merkle.
The Wikipedia article about Michael O. Rabin lists many of his achievements, but all those that are listed there are much less important than his contribution to the definition of the one-way hash functions, which lead to secure digital signatures.
Wikipedia mentions only the Rabin signature algorithm, but that has negligible importance, because it has been used only very rarely. On the other hand all other signature algorithms are based on the work of Rabin, by using secure hash functions.
Re: Michael Rabin has died
#14Michael O. Rabin had important contributions in many domains, but from a practical point of view the most important are his contributions to cryptography. After Ralph Merkle, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, Michael O. Rabin is the most important of the creators of public-key cryptography. The RSA team (Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman) is better known than Michael O. Rabin, but that is entirely due to…
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I don't think that is AI slop. adrian_b often post long posts because he thinks he has a lot to say, but you can often tell that they contain his personal views and points that he thinks are important related to the discussions whereas actual AI slop tends to be bland and generic.
Re: Michael Rabin has died
#15Re: Michael Rabin has died
#16Amazing man, with many important contributions over a very long career. The Rabin Cryptosystem (like RSA, but with public exponent 2) is notable for two reasons. First, unlike RSA, it is provably as hard as "factorization" (as he would call it), and second, unlike RSA, it wasn't protected by patent.
Re: Michael Rabin has died
#17I took his Introduction to Cryptography class when he was a visiting professor at Columbia. Absolute master of an old-school chalkboard lecturer. They don't make them like that any more.
Hugely engaging, the margins of my notebook had many of his quips… there was an archive online somewhere.
e.g., x minus x is zero, even for Euler, so therefore…
Found on Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20210509160248/http://www.eecs.h...
Re: Michael Rabin has died
#18Thank you Michael Rabin for your excellent work. Rest in Peace.
Rabin Fingerprinting is one of my favorites of his contributions. It's a "rolling hash" that allows you to quickly compute a 32-bit (or larger) hash at *every* byte offset of a file. It is used most notably to do file block matching/deduplication when those matching blocks can be at any offset. It's tragically underappreciated.
I've been meaning to write up a tutorial as part of my Galois Field series. Someday..
Thank you again!
Re: Michael Rabin has died
#19Re: Michael Rabin has died
#20First sentence starts with horrible antisemitism. Can someone fix it? (on my phone with kids so not in a position to)
It's been fixed.
Thank you! I’m a casual user of Wikipedia but after this thread I went through the history of edits on the article and...oh my.
I have a greater appreciation for folks like you and the other editors who seem to be constantly removing this type of stuf. Some truly horrendous slurs there.