The science of secrecy: The secret history of codes and codebreaking (Q2736603)

This book, which accompanied the TV series ``The science of secrecy'' by Simon Singh and explored more deeply the subjects covered there, has two declaired main objectives: to chart the ``evolution of codes'' and their impact on history and to demonstrate how codes are more relevant today then ever before. To achieve this, Simon Singh tells a fascinating story from the history of codes using many examples and anecdotes from his famous book ``The code book, the science of secrecy from ancient Egypt to quantum cryptography'', Fourth Estate, London (1999). In fact most chapters of this book are more or less chapters of ``The code book'' enriched with some more interesting pictures and boxes describing brilliant codemakers and codebreakers and intelligent cryptological tools. In particular, Singh tells the story of the breaking of the famous code which led to the execution of Mary Stuart, the cracking of the Vigenère cipher, the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone and Egyptian hieroglyphs, the decrypting of the Zimmermann telegram and the codes determining security and privacy on the Internet. Aside from modular arithmetic and the mathematics of RSA, not much mathematics is presented. A ``Mini cipher challenge'' (without a prize) gives readers an opportunity to test their codebreaking skills (on monoalphabetic and Vigenère ciphers).