Another great book by Simon Singh (read this one immediately after Femart’s Last Theorem).

I’m not sure whether this would apply to all of his readers, but Simon has this amazing ability to satisfy every criteria I’m looking for from a non-fiction book. He touches on all the topics I’m interested in; including cryptography during roman times, the dark ages, renaissance, the great wars and most recently during the growth of the internet. He describes concepts with sufficient brevity such that I’m never lost or bored, but with enough technical details such that my intellectual curiosity is satisfied; there’s always the appendix if the main text is not enough. His writing is very clear and conscience making it a very simple and fluid read, but I still feel as though I become a better reader and writer due to the discrepancy in our literary abilities. Overall, I just love reading his books.

My favorite part was definitely the section about internet cryptography, diffie-hellman and RSA public key cryptography. These were all concepts I was familiar with, but this text brought a lot of clarity to it in terms of how it’s implemented, how it works, and I really enjoyed reading about the history behind how these algorithms were created and the people who created them. In particular, I also loved that he shed light on Ellis at GCHQ. I had also known for quite a while that quantum computers could brake our cryptography but never understood why until reading this book. I loved every bit of it.

That being said, everything from how Egyptian hieroglyphics were being deciphered, to the Rosetta Stone, the various cyphers (monoalphabetic, enigma, vigenere) all have fascinating stories and histories behind them. Small things like knowing that the decipherment of the enigma machine started in Poland, and Alan Turing based his grand ideas on the work of previous cryptoanalysts. Or the fact the Beal ciphers had never been deciphered and gold may still be lying around. Perhaps that the young professor (whose name escapes me) was so excited by his decipherment of Egyptian text he fainted. It’s also hard to believe that in the 1970s, there were messengers flying around the world delivering keys because there was no other way to exchange keys. All of this is extremely interesting, and it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come and see the path we took to get there.

Thank you for putting this together Simon!