Coding in Mathematics
----Andrew Hong (Y8)
When you think of spies and secret agents, you might think of lots of things such as nifty gadgets, foreign travel, dangerous missiles and more. You probably wouldn't think of mathematics. But you should. Cracking codes and unravelling the true meaning of secret messages involves loads of maths, from simple addition, to data handling and logical thinking. In fact, some of the most famous code breakers in history have been mathematicians who have been able to use quite simple maths to uncovered plots, identify traitors and influence battles.
Example:
This is the letter sent by Mary Queen of Scots to her co- conspirator Anthony Babington. Every symbol stands for a letter of the alphabet.
Letters in a language are pretty unusual because some get used more often than other letters. The graph below shows the average frequency of letters in English. To compile the information, people looked through thousands of books, magazines and more and counted them all up to come to a conclusion.
And it's this information that can help you to crack codes. All Elizabeth the First's Spy- Master had to do to crack Mary's code, was to look through the coded message and
count the number of times each symbol came up. The symbol that came up the most would probably stand for the letter 'E'. When you crack codes like this, by looking for the most common letter, it's called 'frequency analysis'. In conclusion, we can see not only has coding been around for a long time, it has very close relevance to mathematics as a majority of code breakers use the system. Other examples could be things such as cracking the enigma, code in 1915 or Julius Caesar sending code languages 2000 years ago in battle.
22
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker