Code Breaking A History and Explanation

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.

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.