| With clear
mathematical, linguistic and technological demonstrations of
many of the codes, as well as illustrations of some of the
remarkable personalities behind them - many courageous, some
villainous - The Code Book traces the fascinating
development of codes and code-breaking from military espionage
in Ancient Greece to modern computer ciphers, to reveal how
the remarkable science of cryptography has often changed the
course of history.
Amongst many extraordinary
examples, Simon Singh relates in detail the story of Mary,
Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code and put to death by
Elizabeth I; the strange history of the Beale Ciphers,
describing the hidden location of a fortune in gold, buried
somewhere in Virginia in the nineteenth century and still not
found; the monumental efforts in code-making and code-breaking
that influenced the outcomes of the First and Second World
Wars.
Now, with the Information Age
bringing the possibility of a truly unbreakable code ever
nearer, and cryptography one of the major debates of our
times, Singh investigates the challenge that technology has
brought to personal privacy today.
Dramatic, compelling and remarkably
far-reaching, The Code Book will forever alter your
view of history, what drives it and how private your last
e-mail really was. |
