![]() ![]() In case you’re wondering why the word algorithm doesn’t have a capital letter like the others, that’s because it’s not a precise rendering of an original name, but a word derived from Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, an influential mathematician, geographer and astronomer who lived about 1200 years ago in an area to east of the Caspian Sea and south of the Aral Sea, a region now split between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Penrose tilings, if you’ve ever met them, were figured out by Sir Roger Penrose in the 1970s, and dealt with fascinating and unusual ways of covering surfaces in combinations of shapes. The topic of mathematics has been extensively and fervently studied from at least ancient Babylonian times, and the names of many famous mathematicians have entered our everyday vocabulary, in phrases such as Pythagorean triangles (those that have a right angle in them), Cartesian geometry (working with shapes on flat surfaces), computer algorithms (instruction sequences that work iteratively or recursively to compute a result), and Penrose tilings. (There… we’ve added a mention of cybersecurity, thus justifying the rest of this article.) ![]() ![]() Mathematics is a complex and esoteric field that underpins science and engineering, notably including the disciplines of cryptography and cybersecurity. ![]()
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