summer reading, part 1

Today I finished reading The Code Book, the book that I started last week. (Oh, the holidays! Reading!) Last week when I went to Matt's second maths camp to give my topology talk the speaker before me was Simon Singh. He is a popular science writer; Ant has read his book Fermat's Last Theorem a few years ago and loved it. (I also bought a copy of The Code Book and a copy of Fermat's for my head of department and second in charge as summer presents.) The Code Book was an interesting historical tour through cryptography, with little stories about all the people behind the different ciphers. I especially enjoyed the later chapters about encryption systems DES and RSA; I've studied the maths behind them during my degree. And I understood about Schrodinger's Cat for the first time (haha!), discussed during a chapter about quantum computing and cryptography.