"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Confronted with the prospect of defeat, the Allied cryptanalysts had worked night and day to penetrate German ciphers. It would appear that fear was the main driving force, and that adversity is one of the foundations of successful codebreaking.
In the information age, the fear that drives cryptographic improvements is both capitalistic and libertarian--corporations need encryption to ensure that their secrets don't fall into the hands of competitors and regulators, and ordinary people need encryption to keep their everyday communications private in a free society. Similarly, the battles for greater decryption power come from said competitors and governments wary of insurrection. The Code Book is an excellent primer for those wishing to understand how the human need for privacy has manifested itself through cryptography. Singh's accessible style and clear explanations of complex algorithms cut through the arcane mathematical details without oversimplifying. Can't get enough crypto? Try solving the Cipher Challenge in the back of the book--$15,000 goes to the first person to crack the code! --Therese Littleton
"How great a riddle was Fermat's 'last theorem'? The exploration of
space, the splitting of the atom, the discovery of DNA--unthinkable in
Fermat's time--all were achieved while his Pythagorean proof still
remained elusive...Though [Singh] may not ask us to bring too much
algebra to the table, he does expect us to appreciate a good detective
story."
--The Boston Sunday Globe
"It is hard to imagine a more informative or gripping account
of...this centuries-long drama of ingenious failures, crushed hopes,
fatal duels, and suicides." --The Wall Street Journal
"[Singh] writes with graceful knowledgeability of the esoteric and
esthetic appeal of mathematics through the ages, and especially of the
mystifying behavior of numbers." --The New York Times
"[Singh] has done an admirable job with an extremely difficult
subject. He has also done mathematics a great service by conveying the
passion and drama that have carried Fermat's Last Theorem aloft as the
most celebrated mathematics problem of the last four centuries."
--American Mathematical Society
"The amazing achievement of Singh's book is that it actually makes the
logic of the modern proof understandable to the nonspecialist...More
important, Singh shows why it is significant that this problem should
have been solved." --The Christian Science Monitor
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