1) Email me your answers to the following questions by 5pm Wednesday January 9:
- What's your name? (as you wish to be called) What year are you?
- Where are you from? (city and state)
- What are you (thinking of) majoring in and why?
- What math courses have you taken so far at Redlands?
- Why are you taking this course? What do you hope to learn in it?
- Construct a metaphor for mathematics (as you see it). For example, if math were an animal what would it be? Explain why you chose your metaphor.
- Please tell me anything you think I should know about you, and/or anything you'd like to tell me about yourself.
- Is there anything you'd like to know about me?
2) The first paper is due Thursday January 10 at the beginning of class. Read Chapter 1 of Singh (pp 1-44), pp 368-369 of Singh, and the NY Times article "Veiled messages of terrorists may lurk in Cyberspace". Then answer the following questions. Remember this is a paper and should be well written.
1. Describe the importance of cryptography and cryptanalysis to the life of Mary, Queen of the Scots.
2. Define steganography and give at least two examples from Singh. Also, give an example of a modern type of steganography as described in the NY Times article.
3. Discuss the difference between transposition and substitution ciphers.
4. What is a scytale and how is it used to encode messages? Is it a transposition or substitution cipher?
5. Define algorithm and key as related to encryption. Must both of these be kept secret in a secure crypto-system? Explain.
6. Describe how a keyword may be used to implement a substitution cipher.
7. Describe how Arab scholars were led to discover frequency analysis as a method of cryptanalysis.
8. Describe how frequency analysis can be used to break monoalphabetic ciphers.
9. Who was accused of being an 'archfiend in league with the devil' and why?
10. Describe how nulls and misspellings were used to improve monoalphabetic codes.
11. Describe the difference between a code and a cipher.
12. Describe a nomenclature.
3) BONUS Problem:
Decode the first cipher in Singh's challenge, p. 353. Turn in just the last sentence.