I always thought punch cards were used solely for programming early computers, but I recently discovered that this is not the case. During my visit to the National Museum of Scotland, I encountered the Jacquard loom, invented by French weaver Joseph-Marie Jacquard in 1804. I learned that this production of patterned textiles was automated using punch cards, demonstrating their use as far back as the 1800s. I was surprised to find out about this historical application of punch cards.

I have been using MATLAB for a long time and was quite happy until switching to the first Apple Silicon M1. Matlab’s full adoption took way longer than I expected. Finally, the R2025a version starts fast, runs fast on Apple Sicions (I only tested M4 Max), and is less laggy.

I think the transition from Java is completed since no Java version is detected on the version.

bench(3) returns incredible results (below). I hope Matlab will support it natively on other platforms that use Arm CPUs.

RSA is a widely used public-key algorithm that relies on a pair of keys — a public key (e) for encryption and a private key (d) for decryption. More information can be found on Wikipedia and Understanding Cryptography Textbook. For testing purposes and to explore how Mathematica handles RSA encryption, I would like to write a small script that encrypts and decrypts data using RSA with small numbers. You can download Mathamatica notebook and also sample output.