Today, I’m going to introduce two ciphers from the dawn of cryptography: the column cipher and the Caesar cipher. These ciphers illustrate some of the first human ideas in the direction of cryptographic thought.
This post is part of my series Cryptography: Historical Intro & Combinatoric Analysis.
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Hi everyone, and welcome to my series on cryptography!
Initially, I started writing this as a single post, but as I was planning what I wanted to include, and seeing how long it would become, I decided it’s best to split it into separate posts.
Cryptography is the study of techniques and procedures, such as using codes and ciphers, for secure (secret) communication between two or more agents. More specifically, it deals with finding sophisticated ways of hiding the true content of messages exchanged between communicators. People use cryptography in military and diplomatic communication, password protection, securing online transactions, as well as in any other context where some secret information needs to be protected from being accessed or understood.
As you’ll see in future posts, probability theory too can play an important role in cryptography.
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Combinatorics is a branch of mathematics with applications in fields like physics, economics, computer programming, and many others. In particular, probability theory is one of the fields that makes heavy use of combinatorics in a wide variety of contexts.
For example, when calculating probabilities, you often need to know the number of possible orderings or groupings of events, outcomes of experiments, or generally any kind of objects.
Here’s what I’m talking about.
