Cryptography Class

Greetings random people who I probably don't know!

I'm taking a graduate class in Cryptography as part of my Masters in Computer Science this semester at UNC. Why is that of interest to you folks? It probably isn't. BUT I am sort of hugely excited about it and therefore I figured I'd throw a little blog entry about it out there. Read on if you like, if not I'm sure you've plenty of other things to do :)

For those of you who didn't know, I LOVE MATH! I usually don't get to play with anywhere close to the amount of math that I would like to (I guess that is largely my own fault). Another interesting piece of trivia is that it was really a last minute decision to take this class since I couldn't enroll for another class that I wanted to due to schedule conflicts. So I was very pleasantly surprised to find out during the first lecture, about a month ago, that a large part of this class would consist of proofs based on number theory and abstract algebra.

To be honest, that initial excitement wore off pretty quick as I realized that my previous knowledge had gotten pretty rusty and most of the stuff being discussed in class was much more complex than I remembered. But over this past week, especially earlier tonight, as I started reviewing stuff it has all started making more sense and I'm suddenly very excited again!

I've been trying to figure out an area of Computer Science in which I'm interested for potentially doing research work. It's probably too early to say this is it, but I think this looks like a very strong candidate so far. I mean this is a field of computer science which is heavily dependent on pure mathematics and at the same time it has wide ranging and very practical real-life applications, the most of important of which is Digital Security. That is like awesome-squared right there :)

Exciting, right?