Some concurrent events.....

In concurrence to the vulgar race for survival and success, there were a few fun events in the offing over the passed month. Initially Techkriti'08 provided an opportunity to interact and listen to people like Dr Kevin Warwick, the first Human Cyborg and Dr Peter Grunberg, Nobel Prize winner in Physics 2007. The game super-pong was also pretty enjoyable during the event.

During the same weekend a lecture series on Cryptography started. It lasted over 20 hours spread over 8 days, covering basics of cryptologic protocols, most popular cryptographic schemes and some cryptanalytic methods. For the first 10 hours Professor P Sarkar, discussed stream ciphers, block ciphers, hash functions and the very definition of security relevant in the digital age. The second half of the series taken by Professor R Barua, was quite mathematical in nature covering introductory number theory, some algorithms in primality testing and factoring for large numbers. On the final day, that is today, the concept of elliptic curves were introduced and some of its uses were suggested in cryptographic schemes.

Thus ended a pretty absorbing week where I learned so much more applicable mathematics and got inspired by a some of the living greats........hopefully something good will come out of this!!!