So let’s say this is wildly over my head… what would be some good places to start reading to gain a minimal foundation to engage with this?

I've implemented ML-KEM by the spec as an exercise recently (https://github.com/AlexanderYastrebov/mlkem) and here are related links that helped me understand the math:

* [Enough Polynomials and Linear Algebra to Implement Kyber](https://words.filippo.io/kyber-math/)

* [Basic Lattice Cryptography. The concepts behind Kyber (ML-KEM) and Dilithium (ML-DSA)](https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1287.pdf)

* [A Complete Beginner Guide to the Number Theoretic Transform (NTT)](https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/585.pdf)

It's a superficial point but this relatively newer style (La)TeX layout makes me much more keen to read documents for some reason.

A nice (short!) video on this topic is this one from Chalk Talk: https://youtu.be/QDdOoYdb748?is=vCFGroHUPwZP7Dqm

Oh this brings me back to my uni days. I suppose that since this is the basis of post-quantum crypto it is a good time to learn this.

Seems to me that these lattices and error-correcting codes are very close to each other, but for some reason they are discussed separately.

I'd wager that there will be some reductions between those problems - maybe I could dig more around that.

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Good stuff to know, just in case the life extension tech explodes and we're all alive by the time cryptographically relevant quantum computers actually hit the scene.