Monday, July 18, 2011
The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography
by Simon Singh
Simon Singh traces the history of cryptography (creating secret codes) and cipher-breaking (code breaking) explaining each step by exploring more and more complex codes. Singh begins each chapter explaining how each new secret code was discovered finishing with how it was cracked.
I experienced the same emotion with each chapter. First, amazed about how clever and creative the code creators were. Each new code seemed unbreakable but by the end of each chapter I was even more surprised by the genius of the code breakers and how they found weaknesses in the codes to exploit.
This book was a good "Math Geek" book being both technical and complicated at times. Little was held back in the areas of mathematics which I appreciated.
I would recommend this book to any who finds this topic interesting.
Simon Singh traces the history of cryptography (creating secret codes) and cipher-breaking (code breaking) explaining each step by exploring more and more complex codes. Singh begins each chapter explaining how each new secret code was discovered finishing with how it was cracked.
I experienced the same emotion with each chapter. First, amazed about how clever and creative the code creators were. Each new code seemed unbreakable but by the end of each chapter I was even more surprised by the genius of the code breakers and how they found weaknesses in the codes to exploit.
This book was a good "Math Geek" book being both technical and complicated at times. Little was held back in the areas of mathematics which I appreciated.
I would recommend this book to any who finds this topic interesting.
