3 ms·

I had never heard of him until today. While I didn't know much about his works, I'm sorry he passed. He seems like an inspiration to more than a few. R.I.P and

• adrian_b 3y ago
  His history book from 1967 had a great influence on the generation of people who have created the civilian cryptography during the seventies of the 20th century, leading to breakthroughs like the DES standard developed at IBM (1975 draft, 1977 final) based on the earlier work of Horst Feistel (1970) and the public key cryptography developed from 1976 to 1979 by Whitfield Diffie, Martin E. Hellman, Ralph Charles Merkle, Michael Oser Rabin and the RSA team. Before that, good cryptography was a monopoly of the military and diplomatic parts of the governments (except that even many governments were not competent enough to distinguish good cryptography from bad cryptography). Because his book was about the history of cryptography, its technical content was obsolete. However its importance consisted in the fact that many of its readers became interested in cryptography, so then they have studied all available sources and they have thought about improvements, eventually leading to new methods and algorithms, which became public, unlike the classified methods used by the government.