IB Maths Resources from Intermathematics
IB Maths Resources: 300 IB Maths Exploration ideas, video tutorials and Exploration Guides
Elliptical Curve Cryptography Elliptical curves are a very important new area of mathematics which have been greatly explored over the past few decades. They have shown tremendous potential as a tool for solving complicated number problems and also for use in cryptography. Andrew Wiles, who solved one of the most famous maths problems of the... Continue Reading →
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulg_AHBOIQU Elliptical Curve Cryptography This post builds on some of the ideas in the previous post on elliptical curves. This blog originally appeared in a Plus Maths article I wrote here. The excellent Numberphile video above expands on some of the ideas below. On a (slightly simplified) level elliptical curves they can be regarded as... Continue Reading →
Crypto Analysis to Crack Vigenere Ciphers (This post assumes some familiarity with both Vigenere and Ceasar Shift Ciphers. You can do some background reading on them here first). We can crack a Vigenere Cipher using mathematical analysis. Vigenere Ciphers are more difficult to crack than Caesar Shifts, however they are still susceptible to mathematical techniques. ... Continue Reading →
GCHQ - the British cyber spy agency - have had a rough few months following some staggering revelations from Edward Snowden, so they're doing some positive PR at the moment to highlight the importance of mathematics and computing skills in code-breaking. There are 4 codes to solve (the first one posted above) - each answer... 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 →
Code breaking is a good activity to introduce problem solving skills and real world careers for mathematicians. Code Cracking worksheets Marcus De Satouy video explaining codes Counton website to generate different codes Nice Morse Code Generator Numberphile also have a good introduction to public key encryption using prime numbers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7kEpw1tn50