Cryptography, the art of writing and deciphering coded messages, has become a routine part of life in our age of electronic banking and Internet transactions, yet cryptography has played a vital role in human affairs for millennia. In this book German astronomer Rudolf Kippenhahn offers readers both an exciting chronicle of cryptography and a lively exploration of the cryptographer's craft, rich with vivid anecdotes of coding and decoding. Stylishly written and meticulously researched, it brings the often abstruse art of deciphering coded messages to the general reader and explains the relevance of codes to our everyday high-tech society.
"[The author] has assembled what is more a collection of anecdotes and explanations than a standard history book, but it makes for interesting and hugely informative reading."—Scientific American
