| Newsletter
09
Jokes and the
Enigma Project for Schools
7 January, 2003
1. Joke Competition
2. Enigma
Project for Schools
3. Mind Games on BBC4 this week
4.
Crypto Titbit
5. Cryptogram
6. World’s greatest card
trick
7. Which singer is in the PRESBYTERIANS?
1. Joke
Competition
I have trawled through all your
entries and have now
drawn up a short list of 15
scientific or mathematical
jokes. I am sorry if your joke
didn’t make it, but
there were dozens of jokes and in the
end I had to
whittle them down.
You can vote for your favourite
joke until midnight on
January 10th. You can see the
shortlist of jokes and
find out how to vote here.
The sender of the winning joke will
receive a copy of
'Laughlab', a book by Richard
Wiseman about the
psychology of humour. And one of the
people who
voted for the winning joke will win a copy of
the
excellent 'How Long is a Piece of String?' by
Rob
Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham, a quirky collection
of tales about
mathematics.
2. Enigma Project for
Schools
Because I am writing a new book, I
can no longer visit
schools and give talks. However, I am
working with
ex-Science Museum explainer Claire Ellis and
we have
started the Enigma Project. Claire is taking my
genuine
Enigma cipher machine to schools and giving
lessons and
workshops on codes and code breaking. I think
Claire’s
school visits help bring mathematics to life,
showing
its applications and explaining how mathematics
has
influenced history. You can find out more about the
Enigma Project here.
3. Mind Games on BBC4 this
week
Sorry for the error in my last
email regarding my new
TV series all about puzzles for
BBC4. Mind Games was
supposed to start before Christmas,
but in fact it now
starts on Friday (10 January) and runs
for five
Fridays at 7.30pm. The programmes are a mixture
of number, word, physical, silly and knotty puzzles.
You can find out more about Mind Games here.
4. Crypto
Titbit
I was flicking through a back issue
of New Scientist
magazine and came across something that I
thought was
rather interesting. In 2000, after 67 years of
keeping
it secret, the US Government announced that in
1933
William Friedman and the National Security Agency
applied for a patent on a way of generating an unbreakable
code. The patent describes and sketches a typewriter
keyboard with electrical connections made through
wheels. The wheels move randomly thereby altering the
connection paths, so that the typed output apparently
bears
no systematic relation to the input. This system
seems
to be remarkably similar to the German Enigma
cipher,
which is probably why the patent was
classified.
5. Cryptogram
This time the prize is a copy of my
cryptography
CD-ROM and the Young Readers Edition
of
The Code Book, just published in America and
to
be published in the UK sooner or later.
The book is ideal
for 12-16 year olds,
Because the prize is aimed at
junior and teenage
codebreakers, this cryptogram is not
too difficult to
crack. You can find it here.
The winner of last month’s
cryptogram competition was
Keith Wallace from Dublin, and
a copy of The Science
of Harry Potter by Roger Highfield
is on its way to
you. You can find the solution and
information about ISBN
error correction via a link at the
bottom of this
page.
I received more correct solutions
than ever before for
this cryptogram, so I have also sent
translations of
my books to six runners-up. Books are in
the post to
Renato Lucindo in Brazil, Robert Wieser in
Austria,
Arnaud Le Breton and Anders Haugen in Norway,
Klaus
Lierschaft in Germany and Roberto Pesce in
Italy.
The online book bookshop was closed
over Christmas,
but it is now open again. You can visit
the shop here.
6. World’s greatest card
trick
I recently came across an
incredibly clever
mathematical card trick. You can find
out more here.
7. Which singer is in the
PRESBYTERIANS?
This is one of my favourite puzzles
from the Mind
Games series. If you can solve the anagram,
then
you might win a copy of Cryptography by
world famous
cryptographers Fred Piper and Sean Murphy.
The book is subtitled A Very Short Introduction,
and it is indeed just a primer, but one of the best
around.
To enter, just send me an email with the answer
in your subject header, and the body of the email
should contain your name, address and nothing
else.
Good luck and cheerio,
Simon Singh.
Ps. If you need to email me, then
please do not reply
to this address, as your email will
not reach me.
Please go via the website http://www.simonsingh.net and
click the contact button. It takes me ages to
answer
emails, as I am struggling to keep up with my
correspondence, so please be
patient. | 
