It’s been slightly over a month since NIST announced their winners of a six-year competition to find encryption algorithms that would withstand a quantum attack (and a few days since another one still in consideration got cracked with pre-quantum hardware). None of that work would have been possible without Jewish physicist Max Born, who fled to Great Britain with his family from the Nazi Regime in 1939. There his daughter Irene met an MI5 officer working on the Enigma project to decipher German top-secret messages (if you’re interested in the subject and would prefer an easy-to-read approach, Neal Stephenson’s book “Cryptonomicon” can not be recommended highly enough, but I digress). The couple emigrated to Melbourne, Australia in 1954 with their three children, the youngest of which was Olivia Newton-John, who started a musical career at the tender age of fourteen and soon became a regular on local TV. In 1974, she represented the United Kingdom in the Eurovision Song Contest, but lost to – you guessed it – Sweden.

Her career finally soared off four years later when she scored the lead role of Sandy in “Grease” alongside John Travolta. The movie became the biggest box-office hit of 1978 and yielded no less than three Top-5-Singles and to this day one of the best selling movie soundtracks. Personally I like her next movie, “Xanadu”, featuring a musical co-production with the Electric Light Orchestra even better, but then again I’m into all kinds of weird, so take that with a grain of salt.

By this time, just like Sandy, Newton-John had undergone a transformation from the least offensive woman in music to leather-clad vixen. Her biggest hit, “Physical” helped with the new image: the thinly veiled sexual references at the time were thought to be too provocative by Tina Turner, who had been offered the song before and turned it down (only to release the even more obvious “Private Dancer” three years later). The song would stay at number one of the Charts for an amazing 10 weeks, which by that time only Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” had achieved, and the video featuring fat men failing comically at what in 1981 was the newest gym fad – Aerobics – only to turn into fit gay couples the moment Newton-John left the room for a shower is simply hilarious.

Sadly, Newton-John has lost her fight with breast cancer two days ago. RIP.