Code Breaking: A History and Exploration - Hardcover

Kippenhahn, Rudolph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0879519193 ISBN 13: 9780879519193

Publisher: Overlook Books, 1999

Synopsis

The achievements of cryptography, the art of writing and deciphering coded messages, have become a part of everyday life, especially in our age of electronic banking and the Internet. In Code Breaking , Rudolf Kippenhahn offers readers both an exciting chronicle of cryptography and a lively exploration of the cryptographer’s craft. Rich with vivid anecdotes from a history of coding and decoding and featuring three new chapters, this revised and expanded edition makes the often abstruse art of deciphering coded messages accessible to the general reader and reveals the relevance of codes to our everyday high-tech society. A stylishly written, meticulously researched adventure, Code Breaking explores the ways in which communication can be obscured and, like magic, made clear again.

About this title

About the Author

Rudolf Kippenhahn is the award-winning author of One Hundred Billion Suns and the former director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics inMunich. For ten years he was a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Göttingen.

Ewald Osers (1917-2011) was an award-winning translator of Czech and German.

Reviews

He has assembled what is more a collection of anecdotes and explanations than a standard history book, but it makes for interesting and hugely informative reading.

A brief history of cryptographyencoding and decoding messagesfrom ancient times to the present, including technical details of various systems used in the transmission of secret information. Kippenhahn (100 Billion Suns: The Birth, Life, and Death of the Stars, 1983), a former professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of G"ttingen and a former director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, in Munich, leads the reader into the arcane world of intricate number puzzles, secret keys, codebooks, and other devices often used by the military, undercover agents, and organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan to avoid detection by enemies and the public. Citing anecdotes in history, the author tells of the Greek historian Polybius, who devised cipher codes; of Herodotus sending secret messages warning of a Persian invasion at Thermopylae; of Scotland being betrayed when encoded messages from its supporters against Queen Elizabeth were found; of Jefferson's key wheel, used by the US Army until 1920; and of the discovery of the famous Zimmermann telegram from Germany, which helped propel the US into WWI. Kippenhahn writes at length about the ingenious German code ``Enigmait was changed daily, growing more complicated over time. After many years of effort in the 1930s and later, the code was finally broken by three Polish mathematicians and Englishman Alan Turing. The Allies in WWII were then able to intercept military orders and plans the Nazis thought were beyond penetration. Today computers can process huge amounts of encoded data and do elaborate mathematical manipulations in a relatively short time. Will interest math mavens and computer junkies, but despite the fascinating anecdotes, the large mass of technical info may discourage reders who are less agile at manipulating numbers. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Astrophysicist Kippenhahn (One Hundred Billion Stars, Princeton Univ., 1993) attempts to introduce the general reader to the history of cryptology, with much of his book covering the events and intrigue surrounding World War II and the German cipher machine known as Enigma. Sadly, Kippenhahns use of narrative prose with stodgy technical jargon leaves the reader with neither a good story nor hard science. The documentation used in the text is sparse at best, and the annotated bibliography contains a mere handful of titles; no glossary of terms is included. Though a generous selection of illustrations is sprinkled throughout, this in no way offsets the inherent weaknesses of the volume. Not recommended.Dayne Sherman, Southeastern Louisiana Univ., Hammond
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Overlook Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0879519193
• ISBN 13: 9780879519193
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 326