My goals while writing the program were manifold (pun intended):

1. First and foremost, I wanted to understand the simulation techniques used by a research group that I collaborate with. Among these are parallel tempering (a.k.a. replica exchange) Monte Carlo, WHAM, etc.
2. I was also looking forward to learning OpenMP and the GNU Scientific Library for quite some time, so this gave me the perfect opportunity to do so.
3. Many projects have been migrating from GNU autotools to CMake. I was curious about it and wanted to become acquainted with CMake too.

The code can still be improved upon, of course. But besides cleanups or feature additions, and considering that my new toycomputer at work has two NVIDIA Tesla M2050s, I think the next step is to develop GPU capabilities.

Oh, I almost forgot that its Git repository is cloned at Github.

Mathematicians have known since Euclid that axioms are important. Security, though, is math embedded in the real world, and that matters. Put another way, Euclidean geometry is completely valid as a pure mathematical system. But that doesn’t mean it applies in a relativistic universe. Sure, we live far from any space-warping masses, so we can pretend that the angles in our triangles add up to 180 degrees. In the security world, though, the attacker will toss a black hole at us to warp the space around our provably-secure triangular encryptor. Was that proof of security flawed? Ask Riemann or Lobachevsky.

You can find more movies at Advent Calendar 2006 – Geometrical Animations.

I needed to roll my own solution but Ryan Dahl has set up the Topology Database and this website not only publishes more implication graphs like the one above but it also intends to be the online equivalent to Counterexamples in Topology. This is a wiki-like site and the author even publishes the source code licensed under the GNU General Public License.

I don’t know (yet) what those numbers are supposed to mean in the show but it seems to me that the last two of them are a tribute to William Burrough’s 23 enigma and Douglas Adams’ answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe, and Everything respectively.