This episode is the second of four very special episodes produced by the students of Stanford’s Autumn 2018-2019 freshman seminar EE 25N! Episode 3 of The Informaticists brings together the worlds of quantum computing, as explained by Professor Hideo Mabuchi, and cryptography, as explained by Dr. Ziv Goldfeld, in this episode produced by The Quantum Squad.

The Quantum Squad consists of Jacob Chudnovsky, Miriam Haart and Nathan Marks.

To find out more about the topics discussed in this episode, check out:

• The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn
• The Code Book: The science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh
• A Computer History Museum article on rotor cipher machines
• An IBM article on icons of cryptography
• Claude Shannon’s 1949 book, Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems
• A NIST summary of what’s been done and what we can look forward to in quantum computing
• WIRED Magazine guide to quantum computing

Images of Ziv Goldfeld and Hideo Mabuchi from personal collections
Theme music: Digital World by Purple Planet Music