alt Hacker NewsWith the caveat (for other commenters) that "lattices" means several things that were not viewed with a unified lens in the 90s and 2000s, the main lattice scheme of interest now (LWE) actually was introduced in a quite literal sense as a PQC scheme.
In the early 2000s, Oded Regev was looking into quantum computing algorithms for various worst-case lattice problems. He was able to create an efficient quantum algorithm for a particular one (SIVP_\gamma), if he could only obtain an efficient quantum algorithm for a certain novel/simple problem (the learning with errors problem). He was unable to do this, so instead framed his result as a reduction from SIVP_\gamma to LWE, and additionally showed how one can build cryptography from LWE. This is essentially the contents of his 2005 LWE paper, for which he later got the Godel prize.
So in a quite literal sense, LWE is the byproduct of a failed search for a quantum algorithm for SIVP_\gamma, and was therefore "post-quantum from the start". Regev mentions this as his initial motivation for looking into LWE on page 4 of his LWE survey
I didn't say Kyber/MLKEM or even LWE was a contender vs. curves in the 1990s; that wouldn't have made sense. I said lattice cryptography. As I understand it, our formal understanding of LWE is actually better than that of the original NTRU problem.
I liken this to the original Certicom proposals from the 1990s versus Curve25519. There's a diversity of curve approaches (binary field Koblitz vs prime-field curves, etc; things were wackier in the early aughts too) just as there is a diversity of implementation strategies for lattice KEMs.
The notion I'm hostile to is the one that poses lattices as moon math.