Talk:List of cryptographers

message: Ww made several tidying up copyedits, but also changed the link from Ross Anderson to "R J Anderson". I can't see why this was done, as the page "R J Anderson" doesn't exist, while the page "Ross Anderson" already existed (and is definitely the same person). Also, in my experience Professor Anderson is generally referred to as "Ross" rather than "R J", and certainly usually signs his books, papers etc. as either "Ross Anderson" or "Ross J. Anderson". So, I changed the link back. Securiger 23:34, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Ross Anderson or RJ Anderson?

message: Now that we got Julius fixed, for which I offer kudos once more; there are still quite a few significant omissions here. In light  of the dogs breakfast I made of Ceasar, I think I will refrain from editing tha article itself directly, but kibitz from the sidelines, sort of thing. 
*Lord Playfair (probably not the correct link, but should probably be made a redirect or disambiguation page; too lazy to preview) I won't add him, cause I have absolutely no understanding of his relative significance beyond the fact that he invented the Playfair Cipher (again, that should be a redirect, if it is not the correct link)
::The Playfair cipher was invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone. Lord Lyon Playfair only recommended it to the British government - allegedly on a table napkin, at dinner. Wheatstone should be on the list, and I will add him. However IMHO Playfair doesn't belong there; his minor contribution is sufficiently acknowledged in the Playfair cipher article, and excessively acknowledged in its name!. Securiger 07:56, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: how about Lord Lyon Playfair?

message: Following comment snippet imported from Talk:Topics in cryptography:
>>>
: "We have an instance in your recent edit at the cryptographer list. The intro noted that home pages would be given when known (and we can discuss why -- or why not -- that was included), and in several of the medieval entries, I noted explicitly that there is no home page. Same sort of harmless humor, of which you disapprove I gather. Do you like limericks, or maybe puns, or knock knock jokes, or ... instead? You certainly hastened to correct an unintended pun recently. I take the position, with Douglas Adams, that it's "mostly harmless". ww 18:39, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text:  Well, I missed the joke, to be honest. My mirthless condition non-withstanding, the explicit statement of "no home page" is surely redundant, and the list is easier to browse when brief. — Matt 19:39, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  "No home page" 

message: *Edgar Allan Poe, an unremarkably talented amateur cryptanalyst, whose public claim of being able to decipher any monoalphabetic substitution cipher nevertheless brought him significant public awareness in his time. Despite the actual triviality of the claim, and the palpable fallacy of his general assertion that: "human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve"; his short story The Gold Bug remains a seminal literary depiction of cryptanalysis.
-- J-V Heiskanen 22:00, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks good to me. Petty nitpicks — I would quibble with the "palpable fallacy of..assertion..human ingenuity..cannot resolve" sentence. Of course, the general assertion is indeed a fallacy because we have provably secure ciphers such as the one time pad. But the ciphers used in practice have no such proof, and it remains an open question whether "human ingenuity" can resolve them; I dont think this would be a "palpable fallacy" to a non-technical reader. Also, we could probably chop out "unremarkably talented", as the absence of any of his achievements in cryptography probably says it well enough... — Matt 22:29, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: J-V and Matt, I liked the entry for Poe; the sharp phrasing is pleasing. But it's a bit NPOV. Matt has caught the problematic points I think. As for Matt's comments, they are anachronistic as one-time pads hadn't been invented in Poe's time -- much less was there any proof of their unbreakability. And, while we probably have (other) encryption algorithms which are 'proof against human ingenuity' now, no one did then. I would agree that 'unremarkably talented' is a bit strong, if entirely accurate and quite nicely phrased, and that 'palpable fallacy' is not entirely obvious and a bit strong, if also accurate. I would disagree that readers will note the absence of achievement by Poe in this field -- people characterisitically don't notice absence of <whatever> as an observable. Some positive statement of his status (ie, nil) is indicated, whihc implies that some reason for including him should be provided. His 'fame' as a cryptanalyst is based on his public boasting in the public press (Baltimore newspapers, if memory serves) and his high frequency of success against reader proposed cyphertexts. Which certainly says more about general reader knowledge of the time than about Poe's abilities. ww 15:32, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Suggested entry for Poe

message: I looked at the list of modern cryptographers and thought to 
myself that it is a pretty small list at present.  What are
the criterias for adding someone to that list?  Just off the
top of my head I can think of many people that should be added
to that list.  For example (just off the top of my head):
Gilles Brassard, CAN, co-invented quantum cryptography and did allot of other work.
David Chaum, US, did allot of work on anynimity systems, blind signatures
Claude Crépeau, CAN, Zero-knwoledge proofs, multi-party computations, oblivious transfer, quantum information theory
Stefan Brands, CAN, digital credentials
Adam Back, UK, hashcash, implemented Eternity server, RSA in 3 lines of perl on t-shirt for exportation
Ian Goldberg, US, broke many cryptosystems with David Wagner.
Mihir Bellare, US, Random oracles, provable security
Philip Rogaway, US, Random oracles, provable security
Maybe a better approach would be to take one of the existing list
of cryptographers that can be found on the web, and add all of those
names for starters.  Then, each name can be anotated little by little.
:Yup, reasonable suggestion. Been on my list for quite a while. Anyone willing to undertake it? If not, i'm sure I'll get around to it... . ww 14:05, 10 May 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd recommend a modicum of filtering if importing a web-based "list of cryptographers", as the ones I've seen tend to be quite exhaustive. I would suggest that we include modern cryptographers only if we have an existing article on them already, or if there should be an article on them, however that's decided. (See also: Wikipedia:Criteria for inclusion of biographies). — Matt 14:20, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

text: I very much agree with Matt, but let me modify to say "article with content."  As such, I removed Carlisle Adams, Stafford Tavares, Adam Back, Donald Beaver and Amit Sahai.  I also removed Stefan Brands: the article on him is a stub with almost no info, and he didn't meet my test.  My test, BTW, was (1) have a paper with 400+ citations or a well-known book (2) have over 50 published papers, or (3) be known for a particularly important achievement.  (For instance, Vanstone has a nearly content-less article but meets #1, and Victor Miller meets #3). Mangojuice 23:40, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: On the list of modern cryptographers

message: I fished the following people from the list of mathematical topics:
Étienne Bazeries -- military cryptanalyst
Whitfield Diffie --  cryptographer
William F. Friedman -- cryptologist
Martin Hellman -- cryptologist
Bruce Schneier -- cryptographer
The first and the fourth do not show up in the list of cryptographers. Would anybody be interested in adding them? I will remove them from the list of mathematical topics  (I will remove the mathematicians too, but the latter will go to the list of mathematicians).   Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov 01:08, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Need two cryptographers? 

message: First off, let me say that I disagree with User:Ww that removing information makes WP worse: I think in many cases it makes it better: information should be consolidated and sensibly organized, and too much information can be problematic.  In any case, the info is not lost: it's in the edit history.
Ok that said, here's what I think we could do with this article.  We should make subcategories.  Right now the only categories are "Pre-19th Century," "Pre-Computer", and "Modern."  The problem is, these categories, particularly the Modern one, are over-broad and not interesting for a bare list.  (And if the bare list isn't an interesting list, it's not going to be better with descriptions, that's just an indiscriminate collection of info.)  
Some subcategorizations of the Modern category: Inventors of Asymmetric-Key Algorithms, Inventors of Symmetric-Key Algorithms, Cryptanalysts, Theoreticians, Government Cryptographers, and Cryptographer Businesspeople.  People may fit in more than one category.
We need to be very careful to limit line-by-line info.  I propose the following guidelines: 
* It is acceptable to include the person's nationality and employer.
* It is acceptable to include 10 words describing a major accomplishment.
* It is not acceptable to include outside links.
* It is not acceptable to describe more than one accomplishment; if a cryptographer is not especially known for ONE accomplishment, NONE should be listed.
* It is not acceptable to describe a less-than-major accomplishment if the subject is not known for any major accomplishments.
Also, we should stick to particularly noteworthy cryptographers here, BUT we should provide a link to :Category:Cryptographers.
I'm going to try to revise the list to follow this and see what it's like.  Mangojuice 19:11, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for that, I think it's an improvement, and I agree, sometimes less is more. The information is certainly not lost: any more info should be in the individual articles on the subjects. I think your guidelines look quite reasonable (although I think we can be a little flexible about it -- sticking to naming a single accomplishment for the likes of, say, Adi Shamir could be quite misleading!). I'd also suggest we add birth and death years for non-living cryptographers. — Matt Crypto 20:31, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

text: I was just thinking about the single-contribution thing: I think each _line_ should have a single contribution, but for people who can be multi-categorized like Shamir, they can get one per line, I think, which is what I did.  It applied only to Shamir and Rivest.. and I think for THEM, it's probably okay. :)  I think it would be fine to add birth/death years.  One thing that still needs cleanup, IMO: can we cut down the list of wartime people?  Some of them don't seem nearly as notable as the average modern cryptographer we're including.  In general, I was much more lenient about non-modern cryptographers in the cut-down, but there was a lot of unnecessary info even there, and it could probably be cut down more.  Mangojuice 20:35, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Plan for this article

message: Why have a list when there's a category?  At the moment it's very out of date - we don't even list Eli Biham as a cryptanalyst - but why maintain it when we have categories to do that for us? — ciphergoth 07:24, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Lists have some advantages over categories: Wikipedia:Categories%2C_lists%2C_and_series_boxes#Advantages_of_lists. — Matt Crypto 10:24, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Or, to be a little less terse, lists can complement categories because: 1) we can annotate entries; 2) we can group people into subsections (rather than subcategories), yet have them all on one unified page and 3) we can be somewhat selective in who we include in the list. Indeed, Biham's an obvious omission. — Matt Crypto 13:26, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is this list for? 

message: The categories are weird.  Many of the people listed fall into more than one - in fact, I think it's a striking aspect of modern crypto that so many people span the various sub-disciplines within it.
If the categories are to stay at all, I think that the distinction between designers of ciphers and cryptanalysts should be abolished - anyone who can't break ciphers has no business trying to design them - and that people who feature prominently in more than one sub-discipline should be listed multiple times.
— ciphergoth 14:37, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Modern categories 

message: It seems to me that the entry in the "World War I and World War II Wartime Cryptographers" of:
"Ludomir Danielewicz, Poland, Biuro Szyfrow, helped to construct the Enigma maschine copies to break the ciphers"
is not appropriate if his contribution is only as described. If he is to be included, then Harold "Doc" Keen, Joseph Desch and Tommy Flowers should also be included. --TedColes (talk) 11:06, 17 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Engineers as cryptographers? 

message: It would be useful to have the persons' dates added (so they can be placed in context). Jackiespeel (talk) 09:19, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Early cryptographers