A40585

This user participates in
WikiProject Cryptography.

Hi! I'm A40585. I like writing about cryptography, but I like lots of topics in the areas of math, computer science, and physics.

If you're coming here from some edit I made: yes I'm completely incompetent with Wikipedia markup, please fix it as you see fit. Similarly, I am a bit dyslexic, so those typos were probably not intentional.

40585 is a factorion! $40585=4!+0!+5!+8!+5!$

I also like a lot of documentary-style podcasts, like 99% Invisible (my favorite!), Planet Money and Radiolab.

My current "project" is reading through An Introduction to Applied Cryptography by Boneh and Shoup and maybe cleaning up associated articles if anything seems super off. I've been busy with life stuff for the past 6-8 months so less editing activity than I would like.

Things I want to do (eventually):

1. Work on Quantum walk
2. Improve the HSM wikipedia article.
3. Maybe improve Value (computer science)
4. Clean up some articles post-translation to English.

Some things I've done that I'm proud of:

• Making the Trigram search article not a stub
• Writing Envelope encryption (the section)
• My work so far on One-time pad, though I'm not done yet.

Some interesting cultural differences between the math/CS/physics side of Wikipedia and the liberal arts-y sections of Wikipedia I've noticed:

• Many, many journals in Math/CS/Physics are open access or have open preprints by default! I've had people see me cite a paper and assume it was closed access because I cited a paper, but that's not true! Many, many research articles, especially the famous ones, are easy to find online in Math/CS/Physics.
• "Don't give examples" or "only state something once." I have seen the piece of advice that it's not encyclopedic style to give examples or to try to explain something a few different ways. I think this is good advice in the context of a biography or a historical account, but this is just good science exposition!
• "No company websites!" This is mainly limited to my CS writings, but I've seen a lot of people instantly discount sources from google.com or amazon.com because they're "company owned websites". I think it's not a catch all, but a nontrivial amount of valuable documentation on these company websites. It's really hard to document something about many software products without going through documentation hosted on a big tech company's website. I understand people's aversion, but in many cases, the company has a financial incentive for this information to be correct.
• Easily the most common maintenance tag I see on Math/CS wikipedia is that citations are needed. I think this reflects an interesting cultural difference that also exists in academic math/theoretical CS and liberal arts-kinds of places. Math/CS has another mechanism for verifying the correctness of a statement, which is a proof. A scenario I have encountered many times is seeing a statement on an article that's uncited but kind of obvious, and after traveling chains of citations, realizing there's no proper citations for it because it is kind of obvious. Lots of simple things in this area aren't cited and have more of a "just think about it" kind of vibe.

Maybe I will write an essay about it when I get more experience and have something more interesting to say.