| 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.
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