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

SINGH Simon

ISBN 10: 1857028791 / ISBN 13: 9781857028799

Published by Fourth Estate 1999

About this Item

illustrated, fine in dust jacket; 402 pages including index. Seller Inventory # 17232

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from ...

Publisher: Fourth Estate 1999

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Fine

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

From the bestselling author of ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’, ‘The Code Book’ is an enthralling history of codes and code-breaking from Egyptian puzzles to modern-day computer encryptions.

Since humans began writing, they have been writing in code. This quest for secrecy has often changed the course of history. In ‘The Code Book’, Simon Singh offers a sweeping view of the subject of encryption as well as its more dramatic effects on the outcome of wars, monarchies and individual lives. Included in this fascinating book is the story of Mary Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code and put to death by Queen Elizabeth. Also recounted is the history of the Beale Ciphers, created in the early 19th-century to obscure the location of a treasure in gold, buried somewhere in Virginia. Singh also traces the monumental improvements in code-making and -breaking brought on by World Wars I and II, the outcomes of which could have been very different without the brilliance of the Allied code breakers. Now, in the Information Age, the possibility of a truly unbreakable code looms large and cryptography has become one of the major debates of our times. Simon Singh investigates the challenges to personal privacy that technology and the ways we communicate today have upon everyday lives. Dramatic, compelling, and remarkably far reaching, this is a book that will forever alter your view of history, what drives it, and how private that email you just sent really is.

About the Author:

Simon Singh is a science journalist and TV producer. Having completed his Ph.D. at Cambridge he worked from 1991 to 1997 at the BBC producing Tomorrow’s World and co-directing the BAFTA award-winning documentary Fermat’s Last Theorem for the Horizon series. In 1997, he published Fermat’s Last Theorem, which was a no 1 best-seller in Britain and translated into 22 languages. In 1999, he published The Code Book.