Neal Koblitz is a mathematician who, starting in the 1980s, became fascinated by mathematical questions in cryptography. In his article "The Uneasy Relationship Between Mathematics and Cryptography," ...

Introduction to ciphers and substitution. Alice and Bob and Carl and Julius: terminology and Caesar Cipher ; The key to the matter: generalizing the Caesar Cipher ; Multiplicative ciphers ; Affine ...

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If you’ve ever picked up a war novel, you know they tend to deal with the exploits of soldiers and sailors, the dirt and danger of the front lines. Not Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon.” This ...

One influential image that is popular among scientists is the view that mathematics is the language of nature. The present article discusses another possible way to approach the relation between ...

"Large bureaucracies, with the power that the computer gives them, become more powerful," said New York Times reporter David Burnham in a 1983 C-Span interview about his book The Rise of the Computer ...

Peter Shor published one of the earliest algorithms for quantum computers in 1994. Running Shor's algorithm on a hypothetical quantum computer, one could rapidly factor enormous numbers—a seemingly ...

Imagine you had to take an art class in which you were taught how to paint a fence or a wall, but you were never shown the paintings of the great masters, and you weren’t even told that such paintings ...

Cryptography is just about as old as written communication itself, and mathematics has long supplied methods for the cryptographic toolbox. Starting in the 1970s, increasingly sophisticated ...