Welcome to part 5 of my series on cryptography! Today, the focus is going to be on codes and ciphers used during World War I. With a special focus on the most notable ciphers, as well as a particular code and the message it was used to encode. The latter — the Zimmermann Telegram — was a secret message whose interception had a dramatic effect on the dynamic of the war.
This post is part of my series Cryptography: Historical Intro & Combinatoric Analysis.
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Welcome to part 4 of my series on cryptography! After taking an in-depth look into ciphers in the previous two posts, now it’s time to delve into the other big category of cryptographic methods. So, this week’s post is going to be about cryptographic codes.
This post is part of my series Cryptography: Historical Intro & Combinatoric Analysis.
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In this week’s post, I’m going to introduce you to the world of polyalphabetic substitution ciphers. And to the most famous cipher from this category: the Vigenère cipher.
This post is part of my series Cryptography: Historical Intro & Combinatoric Analysis.
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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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Throughout history, we have come up with better and more accurate ways to measure physical quantities like time, length, mass, and temperature. This has been crucial for our scientific and technological development.
Each of these quantities has a precise definition and is informative about some aspect of the current state of the physical world. For example, the mass of an object can tell you how much work is necessary to lift it at a certain height. The outside air temperature determines the kind of clothes you would wear when you go out. And so on.
Probabilities are also quantities that measure something — they have a very precise and unambiguous mathematical definition. But still, they don’t relate to things in the physical world as straightforwardly and as intuitively as measures like mass and length.