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Is-a good-a zing-a no one-a will-a be able to-a read-a zis-a. ( )

An interesting analysis of codes and ciphers. Both their making and breaking are discussed and placed well into historical context. A well written book that makes lots of cryptography that would likely be impenetrable to the average person simple enough to understand (or at least I thought so). I highly recommend this book as my only complaint about it was that it hadn't been revised to talk about more recent systems like elliptical curve encryption. ( )

From Library Journal
Singh, Cambridge-educated physicist, has written a provocative study of code, the way in which humans hide the inherent meanings of messages by substituting words and or characters in a text. Author of the popular Fermat's Enigma, he broadly portrays the evolution of cryptography throughout the centuries. In essence, efforts of those wishing for secrecy and others who attempt to break it is a story of intrigue of the highest form. Employing a smooth narrative style, Singh tells of secrecy, fascinating events, and people, starting with Mary Queen of Scots and ending with recent attempts by quantum theorists to construct an unbreakable code. This is the history of technology at its best and serves as an excellent addition to David Kahn's mammoth work on cryptography, The Codebreakers (Scribner, 1996). Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries.
-ADayne Sherman, Southeastern Louisiana Univ., Hammond
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Scientific American
The ancient battle between people who want to preserve secrets and people who want to discover them proceeds as a form of evolution. Codemakers devise a better means of encryption; codebreakers solve it, forcing the encoders to find another improvement. Singh, trained in physics but now an author of works on science, spins an absorbing tale of codemaking and codebreaking over the centuries. Does the simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher, which replaces each letter of a message with a letter from a cipher alphabet, no longer suffice? Replace it with a code using two or more cipher alphabets. When that no longer outwits the cryptanalysts, encode with a Vigenère square, in which a plaintext alphabet is followed by 26 cipher alphabets. And so on through one-time pad ciphers, cryptographic machines and public-key cryptography.

Singh explains them all deftly. Looking to the future, he sees "one idea in particular that might enable cryptanalysts to break all today's ciphers." It is the quantum computer. If it can be built, "it would be able to perform calculations with such enormous speed that it would make a modern supercomputer look like a broken abacus." Or perhaps the cryptographers will triumph with quantum cryptography. "If quantum cryptography systems can be engineered to operate over long distances, the evolution of ciphers will stop. The quest for privacy will have come to an end."

From Booklist
For millennia, secret writing was the domain of spies, diplomats, and generals; with the advent of the Internet, it has become the concern of the public and businesses. One cyber-libertarian responded with the freeware encryption program Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), and Singh similarly meets a sharpening public curiosity about how codes work. His first popular foray into a mathematical topic, Fermat's Last Theorem (1997), nicely balanced technical detail with vibrant storytelling, a quality happily present again here. Although the quantum-mechanical encryption with which Singh culminates his narrative is challengingly arcane to most except for the math spooks at the National Security Agency, Singh successfully conveys its essential principles, as he does those of all major ciphering schemes. Beginning with such simple ideas as monoalphabetic substitution, which can protect the communications of a boy's treehouse club but not much more, Singh underscores with stories how codemakers and codebreakers have battled each other throughout history. A tool called frequency analysis easily defeats the monoalphabetic cipher, and encryptors over time have added the Vigenere square, cipher disks, one-time pads, and public-key cryptography that underlies PGP. But each security strategy, Singh explains, contains some vulnerability that the clever code cracker can exploit, an opaque process the author splendidly illuminates. Instances of successful decipherment, as of Egyptian hieroglyphics or the German Enigma cipher system in World War II, combine with Singh's sketches of the mathematicians who have advanced the art of secrecy, from Julius Caesar to Alan Turing to contemporary mathematicians, resulting in a wonderfully understandable survey. Gilbert Taylor

Review
Praise for Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh:

"Vividly recounted...I strongly recommend this book to anyone wishing to catch a glimpse of what is one of the most important and ill-understood, but oldest, cultural activities of humanity...an excellent and very worthwhile account of one of the most dramatic and moving events of the century."
--Roger Penrose, The New York Times Book Review

"How great a riddle was Fermat's 'last theorem'? The exploration of space, the splitting of the atom, the discovery of DNA--unthinkable in Fermat's time--all were achieved while his Pythagorean proof still remained elusive...Though [Singh] may not ask us to bring too much algebra to the table, he does expect us to appreciate a good detective story."
--The Boston Sunday Globe

"It is hard to imagine a more informative or gripping account of...this centuries-long drama of ingenious failures, crushed hopes, fatal duels, and suicides."
--The Wall Street Journal

"[Singh] writes with graceful knowledgeability of the esoteric and esthetic appeal of mathematics through the ages, and especially of the mystifying behavior of numbers."
--The New York Times

"[Singh] has done an admirable job with an extremely difficult subject. He has also done mathematics a great service by conveying the passion and drama that have carried Fermat's Last Theorem aloft as the most celebrated mathematics problem of the last four centuries."
--American Mathematical Society

"The amazing achievement of Singh's book is that it actually makes the logic of the modern proof understandable to the nonspecialist...More important, Singh shows why it is significant that this problem should have been solved."
--The Christian Science Monitor -- Review

During the late 19th century, private citizens and businesses began to rely less on the dependable but slow postal system, and more on a new method of transmitting and receiving messages, news and financial data. The breakthrough technology was the telegraph, and almost as soon as people started using it, they began to think of ways to safeguard private communications from prying eyes.

One writer in England's Quarterly Review described the problem in 1853: "The clerks of the English Telegraph Company are sworn to secrecy, but we often write things that would be intolerable to see strangers read before our eyes. This is a grievous fault in the telegraph, and it must be remedied by some means or other."

A simple solution to snooping telegraph operators was to encrypt messages before handing them over to transmit, a practice that became common for individuals and companies alike. A hundred years later, we are in the midst of another telecommunications transformation, and concern over privacy is more intense than ever. As our private e-mail messages and credit card numbers ricochet around the world at dizzying speed, encryption remains the cornerstone of our security.

Of course, as author Simon Singh explains in The Code Book, our methods of encryption have evolved along with our communications technologies. In a sweeping overview, Singh traces the evolution of secret writing from the time of Herodotus to the present day. Along the way, he tells tales of the treasonous, though simply coded communications of Mary, Queen of Scots; Louis XIV's Great Cipher, which went unsolved for two centuries; and Charles Babbage's 1850s deciphering of the supposedly uncrackable polyalphabetic Vigenere Cipher. He also details the World War II-era work of Navajo code-talkers and the cracking of the German Enigma machine, as well as the United States' and England's nearly simultaneous discovery of public-key cryptography in the 1970s.

Author of the 1997 bestseller Fermat's Enigma, Singh casts the relationship between codemaking and codebreaking in evolutionary terms: Like strains of infectious bacteria, ciphers grow stronger because, as the weak are deciphered, necessity demands that more difficult-to-crack codes take their place.

Although Singh fashions a compelling history, as well as a skillful explanation of the analytical underpinnings of cryptographs, the most dramatic moments in the book come in the last three chapters. As the book draws to a close, the author walks readers through such events of the past 20 years as the invention of public-key cryptography and recent experiments to employ quantum mechanics in the quest for the unbreakable code.

The public-key method - the first cryptographic system in history that doesn't require both parties in a transaction to share a secret key - is considered the most important advance in codemaking within the past 2,000 years. Public-key encryption makes possible familiar computer transactions like secure e-mail and e-commerce, without which using a credit card on the Web would be no more secure than leaving a wallet on the bus.

Public-key cryptography also helped revive a debate over encryption that pits citizen privacy against government security. As Singh commented at a recent book reading in San Francisco, "I could send you a message encrypted through free software on the Net, and the combined forces of the GCHQ, the NSA, the CIA and the FBI wouldn't be able to crack that code. And if they did manage to," he added, "I could just re-encrypt with Version 2.0."

Singh understands an essential truth about secrets: You can crack a code if you ask the right questions, but sometimes the answers evolve themselves out of existence. -- Maria De La O -- From The Industry Standard

His exposition is especially effective at putting the reader in the code breaker's shoes... -- The New York Times Book Review, Robert Osserman

It would be harder to imagine a clearer or more fascinating presentation of cryptology and decryptology than nonspecialists will get in this book. -- The New York Times, Richard Bernstein

I always knew that math could be fun to read about ;) ( )

Excellent popular description of a complicated and exciting subject. More mathematical literature should be written in this easily written way. ( )