Sunday, March 10, 2019

Women's History Month

In honor of National Women's History Month, the National Cryptologic Museum has this wonderful page on women in cryptology.  https://cryptologicfoundation.org/what-we-do/stimulate/women-in-cryptology.html?fbclid=IwAR395Ib3U8HrocBNW35AbNnk3f8VFw6Pkjv0aop57nMoqrLrMH6NLbZ6Da0

I also highlight several women in cryptology during the interwar period and World War II in my book History of Cryptography and Cryptanalysis http://tinyurl.com/y4ehjl9t notably Elizebeth Smith Friedman, Agnes Meyer Driscoll, and Genevieve Grotjan. See in particular, Chapters 7 and 9.

Friday, March 8, 2019

Young people make me feel old

"1974. I wasn't even born till two years later."

That's the sentence that one of my colleagues rattled off while we were sitting in a hotel ballroom listening to a computer science conference introduction by the conference chairs. The speaker at the podium was rattling off the 10 best CS education conference papers of the last 50 years and one of those papers happened to have been published in 1974.

1974 was the year I received my bachelor's degree. I was 22 in 1974 and my colleague wasn't yet a glimmer in his mother's eye. It turns out that I read that paper the year it was published. I'm now 66 and retired from full-time teaching, but still active in the discipline and in our professional society. It doesn't help that I was the one who chaired the search committee that hired this colleague into our small CS department 13 years ago.

Increasingly, my young former colleagues, to say nothing of my 30-year-old son, make me feel old. It started when my students all of a sudden stopped getting my pop cultural references. I mean, who hasn't heard of Monty Python or Firesign Theatre or America or the first season of the "original" Star Trek? Really? It hasn't gotten any better either. Now it's come to the point that most of the people I interact with at this particular CS conference - which I've been attending on and off for more than 30 years - all have gray hair, if they have any hair at all. And there seem to be lots and lots of attendees who appear to be children. How did this happen? There I was having a career, teaching, writing, doing research, mentoring students, and all of a sudden those same students want to hold the door open for me. It is very puzzling.

Because, of course, most of the time I don't "feel" old. Yes, my knees creak when I stand up from my desk and when I go up the stairs. Yes, I occasionally have to spend a few seconds reaching for a word during a conversation. And yes, my hair is thinner and my beard is white. But up inside my skull I don't feel that old. I still like research and writing. I still have lots of ideas for new books and papers. I still like talking to my colleagues about new things in CS and in cryptology. I like walking and going to new places, or even old places. I still get that warm feeling whenever I look at my wife. So maybe while old is physical, and that's the one thing you can't change or reverse, the other "old" is a state of mind you can just ignore. I think I'll just resolve not to let young people make me feel old. Instead, I'll just feel young and experienced.