![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() At the end of the book he invites readers to test their own code-breaking skills with a forbidding-looking cipher challenge. Who could be better, then, to tackle the subject of cryptography? In his recently published "The Code Book," Singh follows the development of secret codes from ancient Rome to the latest advances in quantum cryptography. Trained as a particle physicist at Cambridge University - his research topic was the elusive "top quark" - Singh spent several years working at the European Center for Particle Physics (CERN) before swapping a life in the lab for one behind the camera at the BBC's science department. How on earth could this be presented to a television audience? The marvel is that despite the impenetrability of the math, Singh produced an immensely human and poignant film - seen in the United States on the PBS series "Nova." He later turned the subject into the bestselling book "Fermat's Enigma," which, he tells me, he wrote as an exercise - just to see if he could. The solution, which took up more than 1,000 pages of densely packed equations, cut a swath through some of the most fiendishly difficult areas in all of math. Having bamboozled the planet's finest mathematical minds for 350 years, Fermat's challenge had finally been laid to rest by the retiring English mathematician Andrew Wiles. In 1997 he set out to make a documentary about the solving of the world's most famous (some would say infamous) mathematical problem, Fermat's Last Theorem. Simon Singh is not a man to shirk a challenge. ![]()
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