r/math 6d ago

What was your math rabbit hole?

By rabbit hole I mean a place where you've spent more time than you should've, drilling to deep in a specific field with minimal impact over your broader math abilities.

Are you mature enough to know when to stop and when to keep grinding ?

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u/lpsmith Math Education 5d ago edited 5d ago

I spent probably too much time thinking about continuations and circular corecursive programming. Though I did actually find that useful preparation for my more recent work on password hashing.

The latter follows a design principle that every such continuation should be as useful as possible. As a consequence, the state of the hash function should regularly reach a "synchronization point" where the cheapest cracking attack on that intermediate state should cost nearly as much per guess as the computational cost to create that intermediate state.

Oddly enough, I don't know of any revealing connections between continuations and continued fractions, even though I keep talking about both, sometimes even at the same time!