CSC 281 Introduction to Cryptology: Notes


This page contains some text notes related to the lectures. These are basically my notes to myself, and are consequently NOT a complete summary of the material presented in class, much of which comes from inside my head, cued by these reminders. Keeping this in mind, you may find the outlines below useful.

WARNING!!! If you rely on this material as a substitute for coming to class, you will likely do poorly in the course. It is incomplete as stated above. Also you will miss out on the benefit of class discussion, questions you may not have thought of but someone else did, osmosis, ambience, being bored by the prof, etc. etc. There is this perverse fact, noted not just by me, that the better the web notes for a course, the worse the overall class performance often is. The only reason I can think of is that the presence of good lecture summaries encourages certain students to skip boring lectures, confident that they won't miss any material, but in the process missing a bunch of intangibles that, in fact, facilitate mastery of knowledge...
Probably this means we all have just not figured out how to optimally use the web for college education. In the meantime, beware the apparently easy path.

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