Well, I'm a senior year student, and obviously I'm not an adept in competitive programming (I tend to read a lot but my practice intensity is pretty low), anyway, being a senior undergraduate I picked up a cryptography-wise thesis, and it has brought to my attention that cryptography and competitive programming are really joint (by mathematical means), Many interesting theories and concepts founded in algebra and number theory are shared between CP and cryptography, of course that's neither a good reason to practice CP nor a good reason to drift into cryptography world, but what I'm saying is, CP did significantly contributes to an easier understanding of mathematical foundations and concepts of cryptography, perhaps CP-mathematics relation are much more bigger than cryptography, much bigger than Olympiad and similar competitions, it really annoys me the "I didn't come here to do math" "Mathforces" kinda comments (especially from core programmers), Well, I do understand that math is just a one topic of many other topics, but how exactly math is irrelevant to CP?, it is not really wise to say "I'm just not good at math" as an excuse, even research doesn't support such claims, math is indispensable part of CP, ok let me stop here as I'm not here mainly to address such issue, I just noticed many tasks here on codeforces inspired by ciphers and crypto, i would like to hear from people involved in such topics, what do you think of the relation between CP and mathematical cryptography?

and perhaps some advice for me and others :)