Deciphering Cryptography

Cryptography, both in ancient and modern practice, is the study and application of encryption and decryption--that is, encoding data so that it can only be decoded by specific individuals. The first documented case of written encryption occurred around 1900 B.C., when an Egyptian scribe inserted non-standard hieroglyphs in an inscription.

Chapter Articles

In Jan. 2006, American chemistry professor Steven Boone and math professor Curtis Cooper found the biggest prime number yet discovered: it’s 9,152,052 digits long. The number is a “Mersenne prime,” meaning that it can be expressed as 2 raised to some power, then minus 1. In this case, the number is 230,402,457 minus 1.