Code Breaking History Exploration Translated by Kippenhahn Rudolf (1 results)

Octavo, black cloth & boards (hardcover), silver letters, 283 pp. Near Fine, with former-owner signature to ffep.; in a Fine dust jacket. From dust jacket: Code breaking has always played an essential role not only in the romance of espionage but, as importantly, in its reality. This reality continues today in an age of electronic banking and the Internet, with its emphasis on the coding and decoding of information. The achievements of cryptography -- the art of writing and deciphering coded messages -- have become a part of our everyday life. Its history, a narrative and a tapestry of fascinating developments, makes for marvelous reading. In this provocative work, Rudolph Kipperhan offers readers both an exciting chronicle of crytography as well as a lucid exploration of the constantly evolving art of coding and decoding languages. Codes have been used throughout history: Caesar sent letters to Cicero and Galileo hid his celestial discoveries in code; various popes resorted to coding messages to their supporters; Francis Bacon and Edgar Allan Poe were both ardent and gifted cryptographers; Thomas Jefferson was such a codemaster that he invented an encryption device named after him -- its modern version was still in use during World War II. Espionage, Cryptology, Codebreaking, Codebreakers, Sociology, Technology. yslic.