My blog is Travels in a Mathematical World.
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Travels in a Mathematical World Podcast is a set of 64 episodes of mathematicians speaking in their own words about their work, maths history and maths news.
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Cryptography
9 universities (2008-10)
Cryptography is the process by which messages are communicated through some secret means, often through a process on encrypting a message using some cipher process into an unintelligible sequence. This talk runs through 4 interesting cipher systems from history and demonstrates the processes of encrypting, decrypting and in some cases breaking these - Caesar cipher and frequency analysis, Vigenère cipher, Enigma and Public key cryptography. This talk will provide a gentle introduction and no previous knowledge of cryptography will be assumed. The talk features demonstrations using The Code Book on CD-ROM. Following the talk an activity can be operated whereby groups of students use The Code Book on CD-ROM's encryption and decryption tools to crack each others messages.
I gave this talk at the following universities: Newcastle (25/11/2008); Lancaster (27/10/2009); Aberdeen (24/11/2009); St. Andrews (26/11/2009); Heriot-Watt (27/11/2009); Southampton (03/12/2009); Aberystwyth (19/03/2010); Derby (21/04/2010).
I gave my lecture on Cryptography to a potential South Yorkshire Branch of the IMA at the University of Sheffield on 19/11/09.