How two mathematicians created an equation that quietly runs the planet

This is a truly fine and accessible article about the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm—an algorithm (not an equation) that all of us use every day. Diffie-Hellman is explained precisely and exactly here with only the details showing how to actually do the computations being left out.

I had great fun teaching Diffie-Hellman to my cryptography students. Of course my students had to do the computations the algorithm requires in addition to understanding how it works. I found joy in making my students do weird and mind-bending tasks with the algorithm.

This post is a page of the Tidbits website.

• Tidbits home page

Subscribe to the web feed to receive notifications when new posts appear. Use a feed reader to subscribe to the web feed. The web feed is a text file containing code written in the Atom syndication format.

• Tidbits web feed

Thunderbird can be used as a web feed reader.

• How to subscribe to web feeds with Thunderbird

Elfeed is a web feed reader for Emacs. Elfeed is available on MELPA as the package elfeed. Elfeed can be configured with an Org Mode file using the elfeed-org extension.

Author: Flower Snark
Email: flowersnark@gmail.com

Made with GNU Emacs and Org Mode.

Copyright © 2026 Flower Snark
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
CC BY-SA 4.0 summary
CC BY-SA 4.0 legal code

Page created on 2026-04-21T19:13:37-04:00.