When I have to wrestle with figures, I feel I'd like to stuff myself into a hole in the ground, so I can't see anything. If I raise my eyes and see the sea, or a tree, or a woman—even if she's an old 'un—damme if all the sums and figures don't go to blazes. They grow wings and I have to chase 'em.
The second american edition of this book has again been revised and enlarged. The chapter on random number generators has been completely rewritten, and the section on primality testing was substantially revised. The new results of Agrawal, Kayal, and Saxena on primality tests, whose discovery in 2002 that "PRIMES is in P" caused a sensation, are covered. The chapter on Rijndael/AES has been relocated for a better presentation, and it is pointed out that the standardization of Rijndael as the Advanced Encryption Standard has meanwhile been made official by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Unlike previous editions of the book, the second American edition does not contain a CD-ROM with the source code for the programs presented. Instead, the source code is available for download at www.apress.com in the Downloads section.
I wish to thank the publishers and translators who have meanwhile made this book available in Chinese, Korean, Polish, and Russian and through their careful reading have contributed to the quality of this edition.
I again thank David Kramer for his engaging and painstaking English translation, and Gary Cornell, of Apress, for his willingness to bring out the second American edition.
Finally, I wish to thank Springer Science publishers, and in particular once again Hermann Engesser, Dorothea Glausinger, and Ulrike Sricker, for their pleasant collaboration.