In my little corner of the FHE world, things have been steadily heating up. For those who don’t know, my main work project right now is HEIR (Homomorphic Encryption Intermediate Representation), a compiler toolchain for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). For an extended introduction see this talk from October 2023. The primary focus of HEIR is to compile to FHE hardware accelerators. And boy there are a lot of them.

Editor’s note: This essay was originally published in 2019. I have made minor edits in this republishing. There was a MathOverflow thread about mathematically interesting games for 5–6 year olds.

Welcome to the 233rd Carnival of Mathematics! Who can forget 233, the 6th Fibonacci prime? Hey, not all numbers are interesting. Don’t ask me about the smallest positive uninteresting number. You can’t make it interesting with your feeble mind tricks! Anyway, on to the fun. Provers and Shakers The big discovery this month was a new largest known prime number, $2^{136279841} - 1$, as reported by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search.

This article will explain how the blog is organized at a technical level, and show how I implemented various IndieWeb features.

Kristin Lauter and her colleagues at Facebook esearch recently announced a project to benchmark attacks against LWE. The announcement was on the post-quanum crypto mailing list. They state: “Our approach is motivated by the need to study more carefully the effect on security of using small secrets and small error in standardized LWE settings like Kyber and Homomorphic Encryption.

This is a story about a failure to apply dynamic programming to a woodworking project. I’ve been building a shed in my backyard, and for one section I decided to build the floor by laying 2x4 planks side by side. I didn’t feel the need to join them with tongue-and-groove, but I did notice that using 2x4s alone wouldn’t fit the width they were supposed to fill.

In my recent overview of homomorphic encryption, I underemphasized the importance of data layout when working with arithmetic (SIMD-style) homomorphic encryption schemes. In the FHE world, the name given to data layout strategies is called “packing,” because it revolves around putting multiple plaintext data into RLWE ciphertexts in carefully-chosen ways that mesh well with the operations you’d like to perform.

In my recent overview of homomorphic encryption, I underemphasized the importance of data layout when working with arithmetic (SIMD-style) homomorphic encryption schemes. In the FHE world, the name given to data layout strategies is called “packing,” because it revolves around putting multiple plaintext data into RLWE ciphertexts in carefully-chosen ways that mesh well with the operations you’d like to perform.

This blog now accepts webmentions. I used webmention.io and webmention.js for live rendering. You can see an example at the end of my old Bezier Curves post. After my initial experiments with POSSE, I’ve made a few improvements to the system. Now shortform posts are syndicated to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Twitter, and the links to the syndicated posts are automatically added to the end of each post.

Table of Contents In this article I’ll show how to use PDLL, a tool for defining MLIR patterns, which itself is built with MLIR. PDLL is intended to be a replacement for defining patterns in tablegen, though there are few public examples of its use.