I’ve written a few posts about elliptic curves lately, especially as they are used in cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs. The elliptic curves that anyone cares about in cryptography have a Weierstrass form and maybe a Montgomery and Edwards form. The latter forms are useful because they simplify and speed up software implementations.
This post is about converting between the forms mentioned above.
In the course of blogging about elliptic curves I’ve had to type “Weierstrass” a few times. Sometimes you’ll see this written as Weierstraß even in English texts. This seems pretentious since not even the Swiss use the ß anymore. If some German speakers don’t use it, I don’t see why English speakers should.
The letter ß brings up some interesting software issues since it usually capitalizes as two letters: SS. The letter does have an uppercase counterpart, but this wasn’t part of Unicode until 2008. This post looks briefly at the software implications of ß having two uppercase forms.
This made me think about another Unicode capitalization oddity, illustrated in a few lines of Python here.
If you’d like to discuss a consulting project, hopefully you can wait a little bit to get started. Several clients that we’ve been waiting on have all gotten back to us at once. When it rains, it pours.
I’ve noticed that when one business owner says to another that things are busy, the other will say something like “That’s great. Good for you.” When one employee says to another that things are busy, the other will say something like “sorry to hear that” or “hang in there.” I’m not complaining about being busy; it’s far preferable to the alternative.