The book is not footnoted but has a "Further Reading" section at the end, organized by chapter. The book announced a "cipher challenge" of a series of ten progressively harder ciphers, with a cash prize of £10,000, which has since been won. The book concludes with a discussion of " Pretty Good Privacy" (PGP), quantum computing, and quantum cryptography. Some of this material is based on interviews with participants, including persons who worked in secret at GCHQ. Later sections cover the development of public-key cryptography. The Code Book covers diverse historical topics including the Man in the Iron Mask, Arabic cryptography, Charles Babbage, the mechanisation of cryptography, the Enigma machine, and the decryption of Linear B and other ancient writing systems. Thus the book's title should not be misconstrued as suggesting that the book deals only with codes, and not with ciphers or that the book is in fact a codebook. The Code Book describes some illustrative highlights in the history of cryptography, drawn from both of its principal branches, codes and ciphers. 21st.The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography is a book by Simon Singh, published in 1999 by Fourth Estate and Doubleday. (Oct.) FYI: Singh's documentary about Fermat's Last Theorm will appear on NOVA (PBS) on Oct. Trans., electronic, performance rights: Christopher Little.
Wiles may have proven Fermat's theorem, but an enigma remains: did Fermat really have a proof using the much less elaborate knowledge of his day, and was it correct? ""The Riddler"" continues to taunt mathematicians.
The history of mathematics comes alive even for those who dread balancing their checkbooks, and anyone interested in the creative process will appreciate Singh's insights into how a mathematician tackles such a monumental problem. bestseller under that title.) Much like a mathematician constructing a proof, Singh, a BBC science journalist with a Ph.D in particle physics, clearly explains various characteristics of numbers and then pulls them together to show how Wiles derived his complex solution. Mathematicians sought this mathematical Holy Grail for over 300 years, many doubtful that it even existed, some killing themselves after failed pursuits, until English-born Princeton professor Andrew Wiles finally proved what came to be known as ""Fermat's Last Theorem"" in 1994, and became an overnight celebrity. Fermat scribbled in the margin of a book that he had found a ""truly marvelous"" proof, but he seemingly never bothered to write it out. The 17th-century French amateur mathematician and all-around Renaissance man Pierre de Fermat posed what seems to be a simple mathematical theorem: you cannot find three numbers such that xn + yn = zn, where n is greater than 2.
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