Mike Stay

I was once a student of John Baez here at UCR and Cristian Calude at U. of Auckland. I'm now Cofounder and CTO of Pyrofex Corp.

REPERIENDI (my blog)

Peer-Reviewed Publications
ALL Christian Williams and Michael Stay, "Native Type Theory." Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference on Applied Category Theory, 2021. Published in EPTCS 372 (2022), 116–132.
PDF Michael Stay, "Differential Meet-in-the-Middle Attack on the Zip Cipher." DEF CON 28 (2020). Video, "How we recovered $XXX,000 in Bitcoin from an encrypted zip file."
PDF Michael Stay, "Compact closed bicategories." Theory and Applications of Categories, 31 (2016), 755–798.
ALL Mike Stay and Lucius Gregory Meredith, "Higher category models of the pi-calculus." Proceedings of Higher-Dimensional Rewriting and Applications (2015).
ALL Michael Stay and Jamie Vicary, "Bicategorical Semantics for Nondeterministic Computation." Proceedings of Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics 29 (2013), 345–359.
ALL John C. Baez and Mike Stay, "Algorithmic Thermodynamics." Computability of the Physical, Mathematical Structures in Computer Science 22 (2012), 771–787.
ALL John Baez and Michael Stay, "Physics, Topology, Logic, and Computation: A Rosetta Stone." New Structures for Physics, Lecture Notes in Physics 813 (2011), 95–172.
ALL Cristian S. Calude and Michael A. Stay, "Most Programs Stop Quickly or Never Halt." Advances in Applied Mathematics, 40 (3). 295–308.
ALL Cristian S. Calude and Michael A. Stay, "Natural Halting Probabilities, Partial Randomness, and Zeta Functions." Information and Computing, 204 (11). 1718–1739.
ALL M. Stay, "Very Simple Chaitin Machines for Concrete AIT." Fundamenta Informaticae 68 (3). 231–247.
ALL M. Stay, "Generalized Number Derivatives." Journal of Integer Sequences, Vol. 8 (2005), Article 05.1.4
PDF M. Stay, "Inexpensive Linear-Optical Implementation of Deutsch's Algorithm." Bulletin of the European Association of Theoretical Computer Science 84 (2004) pp. 195–202.
ALL C. S. Calude, M. A. Stay, "From Heisenberg to Gödel via Chaitin." International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 44 (7). 1053–1065.
PDF Michael Stay, "ZIP Attacks with Reduced Known Plaintext." Fast Software Encryption, LNCS 2355, 125–134. Springer-Verlag, 2002.
PS.ZIP N. Ferguson, J. Kelsey, S. Lucks, B. Schneier, M. Stay, D. Wagner, and D. Whiting, "Improved Cryptanalysis of Rijndael." Fast Software Encryption, 213–230. Springer-Verlag, 2001.

Theses
PDF M. Stay, "Physics and Computation." PhD thesis, Cristian Calude and John Baez, advisors. Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland. 2015
PS, PDF M. Stay, "Truth and Light: Physical Algorithmic Randomness." Master's thesis, Cristian Calude advisor. Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland. 2005
(While a master's thesis at the University of Auckland is not required to have new results, this thesis consists entirely of original work; two of the chapters were published as they stand, and the results of the third are in the I&C; paper.)

Non-Reviewed Publications
Google Book Cristian Calude, Ludwig Staiger, and Michael Stay, "Halting and Non-Halting Turing Computations." In S. Barry Cooper and J. van Leeuwen (eds), Alan Turing: His Work and Impact. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2013), 105--109. The book won the top prize at the 2013 PROSE awards.
PS, PDF M. Stay, "Five Questions." In H. Zenil (ed.), Randomness through Computation, World Scientific, 2011. 105--108.
PDF Mark S. Miller, Mike Samuel, Ben Laurie, Ihab Awad, and Mike Stay. "Safe active content in sanitized JavaScript." Google Whitepaper.
HTML M. Stay, "Bit Commitment Blues." Journal of Craptology Vol. 2. (2006)
HTML Cryptanalysis of Encrypted Magic Folders. 2001.
PDF B. Schneier, J. Kelsey, D. Whiting, D. Wagner, C. Hall, N. Ferguson, T. Kohno, and M. Stay. "The Twofish Team's final comments on AES selection." Comments to NIST, May 15, 2000.

Notes and Miscellany
HTML A presentation on my work with the algorithmic uncertainty principle.
PDF Notes I took during John Baez's class on algebraic topology.
PDF Slides about the Rosetta Stone paper above; there are notes.

Other stuff
Art Songs, drawings, illumination, essays, and puns.
Miriam's music My wife Miriam's albums. I particularly like Summertime and Sing, Sing.
Family A few nice pictures of us.
Cristian Calude A picture of my advisor and me.
Science toys Cut it out, put it together, and wonder at the universe.
Scripts Javascript libraries.

Contact Information

Mike Stay
metaweta@gmail.com