John Nash is a famous mathematician whose life inspired the Hollywood movie “A beautiful Mind”. However, summerizing his life through that light hearted movie would be very inadequate!

So, this genius mathematician who worked in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations as well as winning a Nobel Prize in 1994 appears to also have had some great insights into modern cryptography… back in the 1950s!

As seen in this article, NSA recently released a series of documents related to letters/conversationa between the NSA and Nash in 1955, where the mathematician made an unsuccessful but noted attempt to communicate his own take on a crypto machine.

If anything, reading at the hand written letters are very inspiring, especially since he was only 27 years old.