Intro to Cryptography

This is a hands-on course that introduces students to the history of secret codes and code-breaking. 

Students will start with simple codes like the substitution cipher used by ancient Indians and ancient Romans, and techniques for breaking the codes. 

We will then move on to more recent, and more complex codes like the Vigenere cipher, and the statistical techniques used to break those codes. We will discuss famous codes, how they were broken, and the historical impact of the breaking of the code (for example, the German Enigma code broken by the allies during world war). 

We will end with a short discussion of how codes were completely transformed by the advent of computers.

This course has no prerequisites beyond school mathematics. All the necessary statistical techniques and the necessary (minimal) python programming will be taught during the course.

Learn more about our expert course facilitator, Navin Kabra, here.