Keeping Secrets Secret: Writing and Reading Ciphers

This series of lectures is meant to be a brief introduction to the exciting field of cryptography- the art of writing and reading secret codes. These lectures are not complete in any sense of the word. Rather, the aim to present just enough of an introduction to whet the readers appetite for more in depth study while still maintaining a largely informal tone.

The only true prerequisites to these lectures are a curious mind and a firm grasp of 'Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally' style arithmetic. Along the way, we will present any advanced math that is needed. In fact, an entire lecture is devoted to the math behind Cryptology. This beautiful area of mathematics is called Number Theory, and has been a fundamental area of mathematical research dating back at least to the ancient Greeks.



This work was made possible through a grant from the National Science Foundation.