When my son Jason was an economics Ph.D. student at Harvard in the 1990s, he said: “I have observed that only two economists can push you around, Milton Friedman and Gary Becker.” I agreed but argued that it was a good thing. Everyone needed heroes, and Gary had only Milton. Milton had no one, except Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, but Reagan did not really qualify as an economist. Arthur Burns may...

The last decade has witnessed many clever constructions of parameterized families of pairing-friendly elliptic curves that now enable implementors targeting a particular security level to gather suitable curves in bulk. However, choosing the best curves from a (usually very large) set of candidates belonging to any particular family involves juggling a number of efficiency issues, such as the n...

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