Binary Numbers: Unlocking the key to Modern Computing

The math circle titled “Binary Numbers: Unlocking the Key to Modern Computing,” held on 20th October at LUMS was facilitated by Dr. Zafar Ayyub Qazi (Assistant Professor, CS, LUMS) and Dr. Adnan Khan (Associate Professor, Math, LUMS) and student volunteers. The theme of this circle was public key encryption, which extended ideas from the previous week's circle titled “Mystery Hunters: Cracking Secret Enigmas”, where the students had explored private key encryption.

The circle started with students encoding their own birthdays (Hafsa-akbar.github.io) at a webpage set up for this purpose and accessible by their cell phones; they would then convey this codded "birthday number" to a volunteer who would reveal their real birthday by decoding the encrypted number.

This was followed by a description of the RSA algorithm, and an example of both coding and decoding using the algorithm was given. Uses of public key encryption were discussed with the students, with an exciting activity involving decoding a private key cipher.

Finally, the math behind the RSA algorithm was explained with the students working through a series of progressively challenging problems in order to understand the calculations involved in RSA encryption.

At the end of the session, a challenge problem of deciphering a coded message (encrypted using the RSA algorithm) was posed.

The session concluded with the certificate distribution ceremony by our esteemed visiting foreign faculty member, Prof. Abdelghani Zeghib (CNRS, France).