Encryption and Love

One of my recent book-acquisitions is The Woman who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone  -- a story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman who transitioned from teaching and scholarship to codebreaking and became a hero of the National Security Agency during the much of the first half of the twentieth century.   In this book I have found (on page 91, discussion of some of the ideas of information-theory pioneer Claude Shannon; the story of Elizebeth includes telling of her meeting and falling in love with another codebreaker, William Friedman, and Fagone brings Shannon into the story with this remark:

     . . . according to Shannon, making yourself understood by another person
        is essentially a problem in cryptology ... When you fall in love, you develop
        a compact encoding to share mental states more efficiently, cut noise,
        and bring your beloved closer.   All lovers, in this light, are codebreakers . . .

Also connecting love and mathematics is a poetry anthology from more than a dozen years ago -- a collection that I helped Sarah Glaz to gather and edit (and now available as an e-book):  Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters/CRC Press, 2008).  On page 135, these cryptic lines from Rafael Alberti, used as an epigraph for the poem "Mathematics" by Hanns Cibulka.

                And the angel of numbers
                is flying
                from 1 to 2.
                                   --Rafael Alberti

Cibulka's "Mathematics" may be found here.  And this link leads to other postings in this blog that relate to Strange Attractors.