We woke up this morning to discover that the hot water was not working in the hotel. Cold water does not make for a pleasant morning shower. However, this unpleasant surprise was made up for by class starting an hour later today. I chose to use that extra hour to sleep in.
Class today was focused on the cryptographic applications of number theory. We started with a simple Caesar cipher and moved on to a rigorous discussion of the RSA algorithm. This encryption algorithm forms a basis for how much of the internet can function. I did a summer course on cryptography in high school, so much of today's lesson was a review for me, but it was interesting to see how the math that we've been working on for weeks underlies these applications. It was a neat change of pace for the final lecture.
After a final lunch of gyoza and ramen at Big Soup, my preferred lunch option, we returned to class for our final guest lecture. ____ gave an interesting talk on various functions that have at some point been posited to only produce prime outputs. None of them actually do and he showed various proofs as to how and why these functions produce composite outputs.
After class, we all went back to the hotel for a lazy afternoon. I attempted to take a relaxing bath, but discovered that the hot water was still not working. After some studying and some Netflix, we headed out to grab dinner at Bors, a really good street food restaurant.
I ordered a pulled pork sandwich and a sausage curry soup. The pulled pork was the best pulled pork sandwich I've had outside of the south - so much better than the Caf. And my whole meal was only 1500 forints!
This has been a great month here in Budapest, and there will be a lot of studying to do this weekend before the final.
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