I'd also recommend his The Code Book - https://simonsingh.net/books/the-code-book/

Nice easy reading on the history of codes.

Another good book, but broader than just Enigma, The Code Book by Simon Singh:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Code-Book-Science-Cryptography/dp/...

Simon Singh's "The Code Book" is a good overview and well written.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Code-Book-Science-Cryptography/dp/...

"The Code Book" by Simon Singh is awesome reading. It certainly explains how and why naive schemes like this are easy to crack.

http://amzn.com/0385495323

Thank you!, since I read "the code book" by Simon Sinth, all this kind of deciphering just seems awesome to me. I'll check your articles for sure!

Singh is a very talented science writer. The Code Book still ranks as one of the most engaging nonfiction books I've read. He managed to make a history of encryption into something of a gripping page-turner.

+1 for Simon Singh's The Code Book as an engaging read, but it's by no means a programming book.

Simon Singh is the star speaker. His specialty is taking very dry subjects and writing about them in a way that makes them fascinating. "The Code Book" is his best IMO http://www.amazon.com/Code-Book-Science-Secrecy-Cryptography...

"The Code Book" is great. Very good read and very insightful in the toppic.

Code is excellent, Innovators are immersive, the Code Book is brilliant, albeit less about computer history and more about cryptography in general (all books by simon Singh are super interesting).

Yup! Making my way through Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea right now. It's a little more "pop math" than Fermat's Enigma or The Code Book.

I also have The Man Who Loved Only Numbers and Elliptic Tales on my to-read list once I wrap up Zero.

Those interested in cryptology and coding theory should definitely consider "The Code Book" by Simon Singh. It's a great account of how cryptology was used throughout history.

Gift? Not quite, but I enthusiastically offer my copies of Simon Singh's books up for loan when anyone sounds vaguely interested. "The Code Book" is a great history of cryptography and "Fermat's Last Theorem" is a good history of the problem and its eventual solution.

Thanks! This is definitely targeted towards developers. There's certainly some sections that require you to be able to read some code, but I'd hope to eventually tone those down to a minimum. My personal popular science favorite for that is probably the Code Book by Simon Singh.

I think you'd enjoy The Code Book by Simon Singh.

_The Code Book_ by Simon Singh (http://www.simonsingh.net/The_Code_Book.html) is quite a bit better, IMHO.

"The code book" is a good introduction to history and basics

"Elliptic Curves: Number Theory and Cryptography" is a great, and detailed, text for understanding ECC

https://www.cwu.edu/math/kryptos <-- competition

https://cryptopals.com/ <-- Awesome resource for getting started with crypt-analysis solutions

Not a computing history book per se, but has some chapters about Alan Turing and the work done at Bletchley Park in WWII. Also the best introduction book to Cryptography.

Simon Singh, The Code Book http://amzn.com/0385495323

"The Code Book", by Simon Singh, would be a good companion read. It covers much of the above, and is both compelling and well-written.

Edit: Fixed from "Code" to "The Code Book". Although "Code" (Charles Petzold), on a different subject, is also excellent.

I strongly recommend “The Code Book” by Simon Singh. Really readable and very informative!

I can recommend Simon Singh's book on this topic, his writing is rather captivating (The Big Bang is one of the best books I've read, so is the Code Book). He also made a BBC documentary on the topic.

https://simonsingh.net/books/fermats-last-theorem/

I just found these free-to-watch episodes on crypto, featuring interviews with Diffie and Hellman: http://simonsingh.net/media/online-videos/cryptography/the-s...

This is by Simon Singh, who wrote the excellent book "The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography", including a chapter on Diffie–Hellman–Merkle key exchange.

I recently read Simon Singhs book "The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography" [1]: it is very fun and readable about this (and many other) cipher.

https://www.amazon.com/Code-Book-Science-Secrecy-Cryptograph...

I highly, highly recommend "The Code Book" by Simon Singh if you're interested in cryptography. It has a chapter on Bletchley Park and tells the stories of several of its cryptographers, including Alan Turing and the Enigma cipher.

A good option is to look for winners of science book prizes.

The Royal Society Winton Prize is excellent: http://www.theguardian.com/books/royal-society-science-book-....

Some personal favourites:

The Incredible Unlikeliness Of Being by Alice Roberts is a wonderful book that describes how a human being develops from conception to adulthood in minute biological detail.

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh is fantastic, if a little out of date by now.

Cosmos: The Story of Cosmic Evolution, Science and Civilisation by Carl Sagan.

I read The Code Book in the last year, and I wouldn't honestly say it's out of date too much, since about 80-90% of it is historical in nature. Very well written, recommend it highly, and definitely packed with information.

I believe (citation needed :-)) there was (is?) restriction on the maximum length of private key. This was arrived at based on the computing resources available with NSA so that they be able to break a cypher by brute force.

There's a very interesting passage in the book "The Code Book" towards the end as to how the inventor of PGP was harassed by slapping him with charges under Arms Export Control Act[1].

Zimmermann's law [2] is also very relevant to be mentioned here.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann#Criminal_invest...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann#Zimmerman.27s_L...

Without going into heavily technical books, I'd recommend The Code Book by Simon Singh. There's also Fermat's Last Theorem by the same author.

On the more technical side, it's somewhat cliche but, TAOCP really is excellent.

For those interested in learning more, Simon Singh's "The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography"[1] has a great chapter explaining in detail the creative breakthroughs that allowed Turing to break the Enigma machine when it was stumping pretty much everyone else at Bletchley Park.

--

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Code-Book/dp/0385495323

I highly recommend "The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography" by Simon Singh. Really readable history of cryptography, without much math.

I trust Singh's "the Code Book" is hiding behind one of those amazon links?

I like Simon Singh a lot. I've used his The Code Book to teach basic crypto at high school.

The Code Book by Simon Singh is one of the best intros, I think.

It covers a lot more than Bletchley, but it gives Bletchley really good coverage and context.

A friend of mine built an enigma machine based on the description and wiring diagrams in the book: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19946053957/enigm...

I found The Code Book a helpful read, though it's very much a high-level overview.

If you want to really understand what's going on at low level, one option is to just read the RFC and follow the references.

On the subject of fun nonfiction, I have to recommend "blind man's bluff"; its the best of the genre, IMO. Any others?

Also, broader away from recent military skunk works is anything by Simon Singh, particularly The Code Book and Fermet's Last Theorum.

"The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography" http://www.amazon.com/The-Code-Book-Science-Cryptography/dp/... has a chapter about the Enigma. This book is easy to read as a nice intro to many crypto topics.

"Alan Turing: The Enigma" http://www.amazon.com/Alan-Turing-Enigma-Andrew-Hodges/dp/08... , supposedly the best biography of Turing, I enjoyed it. There's quite a bit on his work on the Enigma but not technical.

I liked Snow Crash and loved Diamond Age - but Cryptonomicon I couldn't be bothered to finish. Maybe having just read Singh's The Code Book highlighted how bad (subjectively) Cryptonomicon was.

My theory has been that after Diamond Age he got to famous and/or no longer had an editor that said: this is OK. Cut from 1500 pages down to 450 and this could be great.

Judging from this thread Anathem might be worth a look. And this excerpt doesn't look half-bad either.

I have this only for concepts on radically different topics.

If it's something about history, I probably learned it from Revolutions, because I don't read a lot of history otherwise.

If it's about cryptography, I probably learned it from The Code Book, because I don't read a lot about cryptography otherwise.

If it's about language features in Python, heck if I know where I got it from, I watch, read, hear about, and find new stuff about python all the time, it's my job.

SQL Performance Explained - Markus Winand

- Excellent book that gets into the internals of what developers need to know about SQL and covers each part as it relates to the 4 major SQL databases (Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL)

- Also has an online version: http://use-the-index-luke.com/sql/table-of-contents

The Code Book - Simon Singh

- It's just a good read that covers cryptography and message hiding throughout history. Probably a solid book for somebody around high school age.

Contact by Carl Sagan - A good novel that deals with the politics of Science and religion.
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse , A philosophical take on life , reality and belief system.
The Code Book by Simon Singh - A book that explains the history of cryptography in a very interesting way

> the only other Stephenson book I've read so far is Cryptonomicon

Absolutely recommend "Diamond Age" and to a lesser extent (but more fun) "Snowcrash". I started "Cryptonomicon" right after reading Singh's "The Code Book", and it just felt like Stephenson did a sub-par job with the subject material (perhaps especially because "The Code Book" isn't fiction, but almost reads like it).

Did start "Seveneves" when there was a free teaser out, but haven't gotten around to it yet -- it's on my list. I'm hoping it's a bit tighter than most of the stuff since "Diamond Age".

I'd 2nd that. I've read two other of his books, The Code Book and Big Bang, in which he gives cryptography and physics similar treatment.

I really loved CODE. Some of these suggestions are more similar to it than others, but they are all worth reading or viewing:

-"Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter is more whimsical and meandering, but has a similar technique of building from the ground up.

-"The Code Book" by Simon Singh is more of a history book, but it has some of the same "feel" in the progression of complexity, even if it will not truly teach you much cryptography.

-The Feynman lectures on physics, which are probably as close as you'll get in tone: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

-And this is a video, not a book, but it stands out to me as a fantastic piece of science communication that is worthy of mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKqof77pKBc (34C3 - Free Electron Lasers)

Interesting that the book received praise from Ed Scheidt, who designed the cryptographic methods used in Kryptos.

> This is THE book about code breaking. Very concise, very inclusive, and easy to read. Good references for those who would make codes, too, like Kryptos.

That sounds like a strong hint that the book comes close to discussing the kind of code used in the remaining unsolved section, though if so I suspect Dunin would have realized it in the writing process. (Others have already attempted and failed to identify the cipher through the process of elimination.)

For a good casual book on the subject, consider Simon Singh's "The Code Book," or if you want something more comprehensive, David Khan's "The Codebreakers" is extensive (though it was first printed before public key cryptography was widely known and completely reset the field).

Quote from the post:

"There's just a small problem.

It's not with the box analogy: as another commenter noted, it's a well known example example you'll find in great books like Simon Singh's The Code Book."

The problem is not the analogy, the "locked-box" analogy is fine. The problem is that the math is flawed. The math is not equivalent to the analogy.

If you just want to get somebody interested in cyptography, I HIGHLY recommend: The Code Book (http://amzn.com/0385495323). It's a great read for anybody who's done a little bit of history by walking you through the role of cryptography and hiding messages throughout history.

Covers most everything in the context of war history as far back and shaving a person's head, writing a message on it and then letting the hair grow back to hide it. Great read that will lay the groundwork of interest for a lot of people.

If you'd like a great non-technical tour of how computers really work conceptually, starting from simple morse-code switches through to assembler, Charles Petzold's "Code" is awesome:

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...

Even having understood for years how computers work in principal, nothing quite put it together for me like this book.

There's a similarly great book on the history/methods of cryptography called "The Code Book" by Simon Singh that I recommend too - http://www.amazon.com/The-Code-Book-Science-Cryptography/dp/...
It's great because it traces the history but also walks you through how the cyphers actually worked, and provides the best intros I've ever seen to public key and quantum cryptography.

I first heard about this in The Code Book, by Simon Singh, which he mentions and is excellent! It's unfortunate that they invented this when they did - it was obviously useful, but a practical implementation was not plausible at the time, so I guess the idea got put in a filing cabinet under "how to communicate without pre-shared keys," and forgot about it.

I second Simon Singh's "The Code Book" and David Kahn's "The Codebreakers".

If you're interested a good story about a one-man struggle to get British secret agents in WWII to start using reasonably secure codes (especially unbreakable one-time-pads), I recommend "Between Silk and Cyanide" by Leo Marks.

A stronger version of the British double-transposition code that Leo Marks hated is the Soviet VIC cipher[0], which only has about 38 bit key strength, but is surprisingly strong for a pencil-and-paper method. For pencil-and-paper plus a deck of playing cards, there's Danial Shiu's improvements on Bruce Schneier's Solitaire[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIC_cipher

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.06300

> just finished Cryptonomicon (which I really liked—probably my favorite of the three).

I pretty much gave up Stephenson after I got half way through "Cryptonomicon". (Really enjoyed "Snowcrash" and loved "Diamond Age"). But then I read (half of) it after I'd just finished Singh's "The Code Book".

It just felt like Stephenson's science and drama subtracted from the real-world science and drama the book was inspired by.

My theory was that after "Diamond Age" he couldn't get an editor that dared cut his manuscripts in half any more. But I'm willing to give some of his newer books a chance -- I see they're quite well received by people that seem to like other good books :-)

If you enjoyed "Snow Crash", you might also enjoy (or hate...) Bruce Sterling's "Islands in the Net".

Modular arithmetic is probably one of the coolest subjects we covered in high school, but we didn't spend enough time on it. I actually learned all about it from reading Simon Singh's The Code Book in sixth grade--it's a great introduction to cryptography and covers the basics of modular arithmetic to introduce RSA.

Towards the end of high school, I decided to play around with graphing equations as colors. I came up with a bunch of cool patterns including pretty much all of the ones in the article--the easiest way to make a function well-behaved across a color channel is to make it mod 255. Playing around with different functions this way is really fun; I suggest everybody try it.

If you want to draw pictures like this but don't want to write your own program for this, you can use mine: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tikhon/draw.

1. Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem - I've been on a giant math books kick. I really enjoyed Simon Singh's other book, The Code Book, so this one is awesome.

2. The Code Book - If you're really into the history of cryptography, this book is for you.

3. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - Not a really a revelatory book by any sorts. But a fun read.

4. The Handmaid's Tale - Revisiting this since the TV series came out and I really felt like getting traumatized all over again.

For everyone feeling cheated by Malcolm Gladwell, there is relief in sight! Buy books by Simon Singh e.g. The Code Book and Fermat's Last Theorem; after his court tangle with homeopathy he needs all the royalties he can get!

"The Code Book" by Simon Singh is a very good history of ciphers and encryption, and includes a set of ten code breaking challenges that start trivially simple (crack a rotation cipher) and gradually increase in difficulty up to breaking a basic public key encryption. It's well worth reading if cracking codes is something you find entertaining.

The Code Book (The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography) By Simon Singh

This looks like it could have been inspired by the Cipher Challenge[1] from The Code Book[2], which starts with monoalphabetic substitution problems.

1. http://simonsingh.net/cryptography/cipher-challenge/the-ciph...

2. http://www.amazon.com/The-Code-Book-Science-Cryptography/dp/...

Three? Which are you missing?

The Code Book, Fermat's Last Theorem, Big Bang or Trick or Treatment (with Edzard Ernst)?

"The Code Book" by Simon Singh is the non-fiction book to read if codes and codebreaking interest you.

Naked links offer varying level of affordance on different platforms. I've frequently been on systems (or networks) in which following through on individual links is a pain. What's particularly annoying in this case is that Amazon's full links do include item descriptions (for books: the title) in them, though you'd have to click through to the links here, search the fucking title and then click on that link before you get what you're looking for:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743217349 fully expanded is:

http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Wits-Complete-Story-Codebreakin...

e12e's comment was helpful: it supported the original post and included additional information of use to others. And as it happens, Singh's The Code Book was not included in the original list. You can find it here:

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Book-Science-Secrecy-Cryptography...

munin would have performed a superior service (remember: writing is for the benefit of the reader) if he'd at least included descriptive URLs, if not the titles of the works in question.

And your attitude could use considerable improvement.

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh

If you haven't read "Diamond Age" yet, I highly recommend it. I loved "Snow crash" too, but DA is arguably his best book. Let me know if you ever finish anything he wrote later than that, to be honest I think he is in dire need of a strict editor that cuts his books in at least half.

I see we disagree on "The Unberable Lightness of Being", but that is fine, I guess.

I think Murakami is at his best in "Norwegian Wood" and "South of the Border" -- in different ways. You might also enjoy "Chrome Yellow" by Huxley.

For something a bit different, try: "American Essays" edited by Shaw (http://www.amazon.com/American-Essays-Charles-B-Shaw/dp/B000...).

If you enjoyed the books on Steve Jobs, you might enjoy "The new new thing" by Lewis (on the founder of SGI and Netscape).

I don't know if you've read any William Gibson, if not, at least read "Burning Chrome" (and everything else he's ever written ;-).

Finally, you should read "The Code Book" by Singh.

These recommendations are spot on.

As so much of Alan's posthumous fame is for cracking the naval enigma in WW2, I'd recommend starting out by first reading "The Code Book" by Simon Singh for general background.

Personally I find Alan's work on ACE the most fascinating. Sadly I can't really find much about it beyond Hodge's biography. Anyone got any good leads re ACE?

You should read The Code Book sometime

"They range in difficulty from simple to knotty and fiendish. We will let you know the answers next week."

It's not a recruitment operation. They're just some fun puzzles which are accessible to laypeople. It shows the fundamentals of cryptanalysis in a way that a casual reader can understand and even have a crack at solving.

Someone mentioned in another comment that Simon Singh's "The Code Book" starts in a similar way and they're dead on. You don't introduce someone to a subject by posing problems based on constructs they don't yet have the tools or context understand. The history of the field informs its current state - cryptography and cryptanalysis have a very rich and fascinating history.

Ubuntu Security Podcast is a weekly podcast discussing the latest updates and developments from the Ubuntu Security Team. It discusses the weekly bug fixes the team implement which might interest you if you're technical enough. I'm not, and what I like about it is the chattier discussions between the two hosts.

In this episode Joe and Alex discuss their recommended reading list for infosec beginners and practitioners. This section starts at 10:17.

    - Red Team Field Manual | Ben Clark
    - Head First Programming
    - Linux System Administrators Handbook | Nemeth, et al
    - Robert Seacord’s Secure Coding in C/C++
    - CERT Resilience Management Model (CERT-RMM)
    - The Code Book | Simon Singh
    - The Tao of Network Security Monitoring: Beyond Intrusion Detection | Richard Bejtlich
    - The Cuckoos Egg | Cliff Stoll
    - Linux Pro Magazine
    - Black Hat Python | Justin Seitz
    - Hacking: The Art Of Exploitation | Jon Erickson

If you enjoyed "Snow Crash" and "Diamond Age", I'd recommend "Islands in the Net" (if you can get hold of a copy) and "Holy Fire" by Bruce Sterling. Or for something newer, "the Zenith Angle" by same.

I've also enjoyed all of Willam Gibsons books, including the latest trilogy "Pattern Recognition", "Spook Country" and "Zero History".

If you bothered to read through "Cryptonomicon" you'll either love "the Code Book" by Simon Singh more than I did, or hate it :-)

Assuming you've picket through the classics shelf, you might have missed out on Samuel Delany - "The Einstein Intersection" might be a good one to try on for size -- although I actually found "Neveryóna" to be maybe his most interesting book (of the ones I've been able to get hold of) [edit: After "Dhalgren", that is. But I think "Dhalgren" is a bit like Joyce's "Ulysses" -- a classic I haven't gotten around to yet. I spent the better part of ten (10!) years reading through "Dhalgren", picking it up on odd holidays - never loosing touch with the intricate unreality within, readily satisfied after reading a few pages or a chapter -- like nibbling on a choice ham that didn't spoil. It's rather more complex than any of the other books I've listed here].

Also worth mentioning in the "might be overlooked" section is Jerry Pournelle's "Falkenberg's Legion" (republished as "the Prince").

I'm afraid I've been mostly digging through second hand books lately, so the only other semi-recent book I could recommend would be "Broken Angels" by Richard Morgan (technically it's number two in a trilogy -- but I find it stands better on its own).

(blogger)

if you haven't read The Code Book by Simon Singh (as I recommended), you'll be surprisingly pleased by its depth. Everyone loves it. It was the book that inspired that spreadsheet; it clearly contains enough info to go and try and implement an Engima machine :) It also covers Lorenz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_cipher) and such. It covers lots of both older and newer systems too, and even has a puzzles section.

If you want more of the human side, "Code Breakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park" is a dry non-technical memoirs by a those who were actually there.

I would like to know more about Dilly's attacks on Spanish Enigma - http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/03/rare_spanish_e... - anyone know a book with any detail? Anything on his earlier work too, even?

Is the book you were referring to "The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography" by Simon Singh?

Amazon link - http://amzn.to/dlNAeO

It's on my reading shelf right now, but I have not gotten around to reading it. I think your comment just might make that happen. Thanks for the recommendation

Things I completed:

1. Elon Musk: Inventing the Future

2. The Code Book - Simon Singh

3. Fermat's Enigma - Simon Singh

4. Deep Work - Cal Newport

5. Smarter Faster Better - Charles Duhigg

6. 1984

7. So good they can't ignore you - Cal Newport

8. Distributed Systems for fun and profit

9. Classic Shell Scripting

Things I partially read and hope to complete some time:

1. The music of Primes

2. Traction

3. Founders at work

4. Your Memory: How it works and how to improve it

Things I would recommend:
Fermat's Enigma and The Code Book are very interesting reads if you are into Mathematics. They are both written very well and you don't need to know too much of Mathematics to understand it. On the other hand The Music of Primes started of very interesting and then got a bit too heavy for an evening read. If you can chug along I think it would be a good one too.

Of all the self help books I mentioned I think Duhiggs Smarter, faster better is the one that stands out. It is more of an analysis of various teams and people and how they got to work efficiently.

Founders at work is a long read but something that you can read a chapter independently and that's why it is under half read but definitely something to look at.

[EDIT: formatting]

This wikipedia article doesn't describe its History nor its Use at all!

Its widely described in cryptography literature not as a security device but as a literary one.

Atbash mostly survives in Jewish Kabbalahs, mystic and allegorical writings. Two atbash phrases are used in just three places in one book of the bible (Jeremiah), and these were probably added early on but not in there originally (as they don't occur in the Septuagint, for example).

Here's The Code Book (Simon Singh) description:

"Atbash and other similar biblical ciphers where probably intended only to add mystery, rather than conceal meaning"

"Applied Cryptography" by Bruce Schneier, is 'the bible', covering the motivation behind the invention of many of modern algorithms, as well as most of the maths.

"The Code Book" by Simon Singh is an enjoyable read regarding the historical aspects of codes, ciphers and cryptography. I don't know how this compares with other books on the same subject, but I found it interesting and informative.

It's not in the same league as Applied Crypto though — totally different kinda thing: The Code Book is something you could gift for xmas, whereas Applied Crypto is a hard core coder reference book.

A snapshot of my bookshelf's "math" section, which really hasn't changed much since I was in high school and hadn't taken calculus:

W.W. Sawyer, What is Calculus About? and Mathematician's Delight

Courant and Robbins, What is Mathematics?

Hogben, Mathematics for the Million

Steinhaus, Mathematical Snapshots

Ivars Peterson, The Mathematical Tourist

Davis and Hersh, The Mathematical Experience

Polya, How to Solve It

Huff, How to Lie With Statistics

McGervey, Probabilities in Everyday Life

Raymond Smullyan: The Lady or the Tiger, Alice in Puzzle-Land, others

Anything by Martin Gardner. I happen to have picked up Mathematical Magic Show and Mathematical Circus, but I'm sure there are many other collections.

I also recommend cryptography stuff. David Kahn's The Codebreakers is not really a math book, but it is awesome and it stars mathematicians, as does Simon Singh's The Code Book. You could read Schneier's Applied Cryptography.

This is HN, so I would be remiss if I didn't point out that you can learn a lot of fun and useful math by reading SICP, Knuth, or any good algorithms book.

If anybody out there knows a good, spirited statistics book addressed to someone who knows calculus, tell me. I keep planning to go through Fundamentals of Applied Probability Theory but I never get around to it; see "Related Resources" here:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...

Having said all of that: I have a Ph.D. in physics/EE, so I've got to tell you, if you haven't tried calculus you haven't lived. ;) I'm not sure how to go about learning calculus in a fun way for a mathematician -- I took fairly standard first- and second-year college courses in calculus and physics and learned it that way. The folks on Amazon seem kind of enthusiastic about Spivak:

http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Michael-Spivak/dp/0914098918/...

Well it goes like this....

There was a lot of publicity and propaganda and hype around Alan Turing and cyber-security over the last few years in the UK media. This drove a whole codebreaking fascination thing with mathematics.

So not wishing to miss out on all the action, a project was started called The Enigma Project which features basic codebreaking challenges (basic substitution ciphers, OTP etc) aimed at primary school children. This was started by Simon Singh / Cambridge University after good old Si released a book called The Code Book after which he wanted to drum up publicity rapidly. No other reason.

So after a year or so of neglect these sheets work their way into "photocopy circulation" amongst schools in the UK as part of the typical "teachers don't give a shit and just want to hand out worksheets" culture that appeared.

Obviously any other material that could be assembled cheaply was chucked on the back. Turns out there's a couple of sheets plainly marked from GCHQ in there as well as "additional exercises". Rather interesting as they are above what you'd consider appropriate for that age (prime factorisation and rapid factorisation techniques etc). Very odd!

Now this in itself is pretty null and void but it leads into the culture which I experienced where we were asked in secondary school mathematics to enter various "challenges" to play off against other schools. I was pretty good at mathematics (at GCSE and A-level) and did well on these challenges but was approached after this by people recruiting for SIGINT rather than go to university. Other people who did well were similarly propositioned. I impolitely declined and relaxed into a life of electrical engineering, pizza and beer which I thoroughly don't regret.

I'm worried my children will be similarly filtered out and recruited to be honest.

The Code Book [0] by Simon Singh (1999) is another famed popular science book that offers a non-technical introduction to cryptography and its history, there's also an indie game [1] Cypher by Matthew Brown (2018) inspirited by the book.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Code_Book

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/746710/Cypher/

Yes!

I actually just finished "Fermat's Last Enigma" after reading "The Code Book" 2 years ago.

He's an excellent author who begins all of his books with the premise that the lay person will be reading it. He even makes this explicit in Fermat's Last Enigma.

He gives the reader an amazing depth of knowledge by gradually building on very simple examples and explanations which still can intrigued someone with deep technical knowledge.

Coming into "Fermat's Last Enigma", I had two years of higher level math, number theory, discrete math, and linear algebra. I still learned so much about Mathematics, the progress of the field, and proofs of simple things like Pythagorean triples.

Singh is the best scientific writer, truly.

This is not related to password hashing algorithms being discussed here, but:

mathematically-secure cryptography was invented in 1882/1917: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad

Fun further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project

Also, fun reading: The Code Book by Simon Singh, and Spycatcher by Peter Wright

Oh, lots! I wish you'd narrow down to some categories you're interested in.

A few example i enjoyed:
The State of Africa, Martin Meredith
The Code Book, Simon Singh
Pity the Nation, Robert Fisk
The Great War for Civilization, Robert Fisk
Alan Turing: The Enigma, Andrew Hodges
Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela
The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch
Fermat's Engima, Simon Singh

Lots more....

The Code Book by Simon Singh

Simon Singh's The Code Book[1] is excellent, if around 10 years old:

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.

Later sections cover the development of public-key cryptography. Some of this material is based on interviews with participants, including persons who worked in secret at GCHQ.

[2]

[1] http://simonsingh.net/books/the-code-book/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Code_Book

One of my favorite math-related scenes in The Simpsons is where Prof. Frink is standing on stage in front of a group of scientists and not getting attention.

Prof. Frink: "Looking for some order. Some order please with the eyes forward and the hands neatly folded."

(Audience not paying attention.)

Prof. Frink: "Hrm..."

Prof. Frink: "Pi is exactly three!"

(Collective gasp from the audience. Prof. Frink now has their attention.)

---

Edit: Went looking for part of the quote which I couldn't catch, found a book which seems interesting. Simon Singh, 2013. The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets [1]. Singh is also known for his 1997 book Fermat's Enigma [2] and his 1999 book The Code Book [3]. The former of the books I've heard is interesting and the latter of which I enjoyed very much back when I read it.

[1]: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17287021-the-simpsons-and...

[2]: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38412.Fermat_s_Enigma

[3]: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17994.The_Code_Book

I would start by informing them that ENIGMA was actually broken by Poland, and they invited the British two weeks before the German invasions to show them how it worked and give them a prototype enigma breaking machine. They didn't want the technique and knowledge in how to break enigma to be lost after Germany invaded. The French also got a copy, and it was actually the French intelligence service that had gathered the initial data and it was unknown to them that this enabled the polish to break ENIGMA.

What turning did was to take the initial prototype they received and build a even more powerful and refined version. In particular he improved the technique so it broke the naval version of enigma which was more complicated than the army version that the polish had broken earlier. This was in part possible because the British had captured a working naval enigma from a German submarine.

(A lot of this comes a book called The Code Book by Simon Singh. The last chapter on modern ciphers is a bit dated but the chapters on enigma was quite good.

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=598385

In addition to the book on cryptography, Singh also directed the film about Fermat's Last Theorem ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermats_last_theorem

... first transmitted by the BBC as part of the Horizon series, subsequently aired in the USA as part of the NOVA series. He also wrote the book that followed. Both have been mentioned here before, both are most highly recommended. The Wikipedia article references Singh's book copiously.

The Code Book, mentioned elsewhere, was his second book.

You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Singh

I know Simon quite well, and am following the libel case with interest. (The wikipedia article also references John Stillwell, whom I also know. This is slightly worrying ...)