I’m falling way behind on Kelsey Houston-Edwards’s video series, sadly. Her “How to Break Crytography” video is so freaking amazing that it needed to be first in line in my effort to catch up!
So, this morning I watched the video with the boys. We stopped the video a few times to either work through some of the math, or simply to just have me explain it a bit. Overall, though, I think this video is not just accessible to kids, but is something that they will find absolutely fascinating.
Here’s what my kids took away from it:
Next we went upstairs to write some Mathematica code to step through the process that Houston-Edwards described in her video. In this video we (slightly clumsily) step through the code and check a few small examples:
When I turned the camera off after the last video my younger son asked a really interesting question -> Why don’t we just use Mathematica’s “FactorInteger[]” function?
We talked about that for a bit in this video and then tried to use Shor’s algorithm to find the factors of a number that was the product of two 4 digit primes.
So, we had the camera off for a little over a minute after the last video, but the good news is that Mathematica did, indeed, finish the calculation. It was a nice (and somewhat accidental) example of how quickly this algorithm runs into trouble.
The cool thing, though, is that it did work 🙂
Definitely a fun project, though it does require a bit more computer power than most of our other projects. I’m happy to be catching up a little on Kelsey Houston-Edwards’s video series – it really is one of the best math-related things on the internet!
Mike's Math Page 