In my post on quantum inspired classical results, I gave as one example Gentry’s recent discovery of a fully homomorphic encryption scheme. His beautiful work deserves its own blog post. Initially I approached his work with trepidation, worried that it would be so technical I would not understand anything without a lot of work. Others have mentioned not  having looked at his work for the same reason. That is a shame! While the details are technical, the key idea, bootstrappable encryption, is both a non-obvious approach and an easily understandable concept.  I remember smiling while I read the first couple of pages of his paper in response to the elegance and surprising simplicity of his approach.

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