Simon Singh
speaker
239 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2013
last heard Jan 2015
Simon Singh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Millennia, until the universe goes stone cold, ultimately.
So our entire global security, whether it's in terms of personal communications, diplomatic communications, financial transactions, medical records, all of these...
To a very, very large extent, these security issues rely on factoring being a fundamentally hard thing to do.
And if a mathematician wakes up tomorrow and figures out how to factor quickly, there's kind of a moral dilemma there.
Do you tell the world and disrupt this stable situation or do you keep it quiet?
I'm not sure what I would do.
This story was broken to the world by the great works of Martin Gardner.
My number of the year is 22.
It relates to a problem called pancake sorting.
And pancake sorting is about imagining you have a stack of pancakes and they're of different sizes and they're in the wrong order and you want to get them into the right order by using a spatula.
You put your spatula in somewhere in the stack and you flip over some pancakes.
So let's imagine we only have one pancake that's bound to come in the right order.
So the pancake number for one pancake is zero.
Don't need any flips.
If you have two pancakes and they're in the wrong order, then the pancake number is one because you only need one flip to flip them both over.
So the pancake number for two pancakes is one.
Pancake number for three pancakes.
Turns out, if it comes in the worst possible order, you need three flips to do that.
And you can work out the pancake number for various numbers of pancakes.
And the pancake number for 19 is 22.
Showing 101–120 of 239 · page 6 of 12
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