IB Maths Resources from Intermathematics
IB Maths Resources: 300 IB Maths Exploration ideas, video tutorials and Exploration Guides
Chi Square: Language Detection + Code Breaking We can use the power of maths to allow computers to accurately recognise which language someone is writing in - even without needing to have understanding of any language at all. How? With the Chi Square goodness of fit test. Every language in the world has its own... Continue Reading →
Crack the Beale Papers and find a $65 Million buried treasure? The story of a priceless buried treasure of gold, silver and jewels (worth around $65 million in today's money) began in January 1822. A stranger by the name of Thomas Beale walked into the Washington Hotel Virginia with a locked iron box, which he gave... Continue Reading →
Cracking ISBN and Credit Card Codes ISBN codes are used on all books published worldwide. It’s a very powerful and useful code, because it has been designed so that if you enter the wrong ISBN code the computer will immediately know – so that you don’t end up with the wrong book. There is lots... Continue Reading →
Crack the Beale Papers and find a $65 Million buried treasure? The story of a priceless buried treasure of gold, silver and jewels (worth around $65 million in today's money) began in January 1822. A stranger by the name of Thomas Beale walked into the Washington Hotel Virginia with a locked iron box, which he gave... Continue Reading →
The one time pad is a very secure way of encoding messages - so secure in fact that it is unbreakable as long as the agents using it don't make any mistakes. It was a very popular method of sending coded messages during the Second World War - and persisted well into the Cold War,... Continue Reading →
International School Code Breaking Challenge We're now running a huge school code breaking competition. There are a total of 7 competitions to enter - each one with a number of codes to crack. Each time a code is cracked this gives the password to access the next clue. Students who break all codes will be... Continue Reading →
Murder in the Maths Department A murder has been committed in the maths department! A body has been discovered surrounded by mathematical objects and only the hardworking maths teachers were in school, doing long division sums for fun at the weekend. One of them must be the murderer. (The wall of fame of successful detectives... Continue Reading →
This is inspired from the great site, Practical Cryptography which is a really good resource for code making and code breaking. One of their articles is about how we can use the Chi Squared test to crack a Caesar Shift code. Indeed, if you use an online program to crack a Caesar shift, they are... Continue Reading →