Goodbye, Miss Granger - Part 6 - Sex Stories

Goodbye, Miss Granger - Part 6

... visibly preened at my gratitude. “Tell me how you selected Whit Diffie. You didn’t look up my Master’s thesis on the internet did you? I used to love this type of thing.” “Well I was reading this book about how the Brits broke the Nazis’ Enigma code in World War II,” he began. “Fact or fiction?” I asked. “Fiction,” he said. “But it blended the facts and the real people like that computer guy Alan Turing with fictional characters like this guy Waterhouse; he was a kind of über-mathematician and code breaker.” “Cryptonomicon,” I said, grinning like a schoolgirl. “By Neal Stephenson.” “You’ve read it too?” he asked happily. “Josh,” I smiled warmly, “Cryptonomicon might just be my favourite book of all time.” “Yeah?” he asked rhetorically, sitting down in the front desk so that he wouldn’t be looking down at me. “So anyway, according to this book, breaking Enigma was the turning point of the war …” “That bit is actually true,” I interrupted. “… so you could kind of say if it wasn’t for maths, we might all be Nazis,” he explained. “That’s a bit of a stretch,” I said. “But I take your meaning. If you’re saying that those mathematicians were actually war heroes, then I agree.” “Yeah, right! Heroes,” he said, pointing at me happily. “So I thought I’d find out who the real Waterhouse was and pick him for my essay.” “But you didn’t,” I said, even though I probably knew what was coming next. “There wasn’t really one person to pick,” he said, disappointed. “The code-breaking was sort ...

... of a team-effort.” “What about Turing?” I asked. “He’s the one everybody remembers from the Bletchley Park team.” I was twitching in my seat and I could feel my skin tingling. This was the most exciting conversation I’d had with a student in my short teaching career. I could almost see this reactive boy growing into a thinking man in front of me. It was intoxicating! “I almost did,” he said, his eyes dropping. I could see he thought he’d made a mistake and had disappointed me. “But …” “But what?” I asked, leaning forward and trying not to show how exciting this was for me. Hell, how sexy it was. “Well,” he said, shuffling his feet. “He was a mathematician …” “He was,” I agreed. “A brilliant one.” “And he was influential …” he added. “Very much so,” I said. Please don’t say it’s because he was gay. Please! “But he was more influential for the machines – the ‘ bombes’ – that he built to crack the new Enigma settings every day,” he explained. “Not for his maths.” I wiped away a tear building up in my eye. I was so proud . And kind of turned on, too; I was thinking about what a mature perspective he had – one that I had helped to develop – but I was looking at the sexy package that it was wrapped up in and those emotions were getting confused in my head. “And you asked for the most influential mathematician ,” he added. “Not the most influential … I don’t know … engineer? Computer scientist?” “So,” I prompted. “Whit Diffie?” “I came across him when I was Googling mathematics and ...