“Your father, the minister of the interior of the Syrian Arab Republic, understands the practical side to working out the decimal expansion of pi?”
“Sir, my father holds advanced degrees in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He did his master’s thesis on common knowledge and his doctoral thesis on game theory. Which explains how he came to be in charge of my country’s encryption and decryption service. Which also explains how he understands your remarkable contribution to the art of cryptography. I only grasp it imperfectly, sir, the mathematics being clearly over my head, but you seem to have devised a computer program that dips with near-perfect randomness into three billion, three hundred and thirty million, t
