Instructor: David Savitt
Office: Math Building, Room 214
E-mail: savitt at math dot arizona dot edu (PGP public key)
Phone: 621-2170
Office hours: Mondays and Thursdays, 2-3 pm

Time: MWF, 3-3:50 pm
Location: Modern Languages 314

TA: Brendan Fry
E-mail: bfry at email dot arizona dot edu

Course policy
Syllabus and Textbooks
Project suggestions and guidelines

Homework

Homework 1 (due Feb. 4): pdf
Homework 2 (due Feb. 11): pdf and text file for #2
Homework 3 (due Feb. 25): pdf
Homework 4 (due Mar. 5): MacKay Ch. 8 #1,5,6,10 (p.140-1); read MacKay Ch. 18
Homework 5 (due Mar. 14): pdf
Homework 6 (due Apr. 23): pdf
Homework 7 (due May 2): pdf

Supplementary texts

Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms, by David MacKay

A wonderful text, which we will follow for our discussion of probability and information theory. You can download the book in PDF form, or buy a hard copy of the book (it's not outrageously expensive).

The Handbook of Applied Cryptography, by Menezes, van Oorschot, and Vanstone

An encyclopedic reference text, recently made available free on the web.

A Classical Introduction to Cryptography, by Serge Vaudenay

A mathematical cryptography textbook which is available online from Springer; the link will work from within the UA computer network. I haven't looked at this book seriously, but the price is right.

Introduction to Probability, by Charles Grinstead and J. Laurie Snell

(Thanks to Petr Moravsky for the link.)

A Mathematical Theory of Communication, by Claude Shannon

Classic paper in which Shannon founds the field of information theory.

Handouts, Downloads, and Links

Letter Frequencies
Caesar shifts: scoring "perfect" text
Caesar shifts: sample text
Caesar shifts: scoring spreadsheet
Word frequencies in the Brown Corpus