anything from working out a company’s payroll to determining the grades of students
in a certain class. (For more about algorithms, see “Foundations of Mathematics.”)What is cryptography?
Because of the extensive connections between computers across the Internet, it has
become necessary to find ways to protect data and messages from tampering or read-
ing. This includes protecting people’s personal information when they buy things over
the Internet and those who need to keep banking data secure. One of the major tech-
niques for ensuring such privacy of files and communications is called cryptography.
Cryptography is a mathematical science used to secure the confidentiality (and
authentication) of data sent by a user to a certain site. It secures the data by replacing
it with a transformed version that can then be reconverted to show the original data,
but only by someone with the correct cryptographic algorithm and key. This is why,
when ordering over the Internet, it is important to see the “lock” icon at the bottom of
the screen. This is your way of knowing that cryptography is working and the data is
secure, thus preventing the data’s unauthorized use.Have computershad an effecton the field of statistics?
Yes, computers have had a definite effect on the field of statistics. In particular, per-
sonal computers, software such as spreadsheets and professional statistical packages,
and other information technologies are now an integral part of statistical data analy-
sis. These tools have enabled statisticians to perform realistic statistical data analysis
on large amounts of data faster and cheaper than ever before.
Statistical software systems are most often used to determine examples, under-
stand existing concepts in the statistics, and to find new trends in statistical data. Most
of the packages allow the data to be entered into the computer program, but the
emphasis then switches to the statistician’s ability to interpret the data.
There are two well-known programs often used in statistics: the SAS and SPSS,
368 both of which are commercial statistical packages. The SAS system is a statistics,
Have computers been used to determine the value of pi (π)?
Y
es, computers have been used to determine the value of pi, but no computer
has yet found the “final” number in the long progression of numbers. They
probably never will, because pi is considered to be an infinite number. But for
the sake of just trying, larger and faster computers are often used for this task.
To date, pi has been found to more than six billion places. (For more about pi,
see “Mathematics throughout History.”)