ACCESS-Math Tuesday June 15, 2004

ACCESS-UGS 1430
Math Portion
Summer 2004

College of Science
Math Department
ACCESS math home page

Send e-mail to :
Nick Korevaar
Sharon Davis Sid Rudolph
Irene Cervantes

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

You can do substitution cipher solving by hand of course, but technology can help too. And since part of the point of our current work is to get comfortable with the technology, we have a good excuse to play with it now. While you're waiting, try the code at
Caesar shift code. (If it's working today.)

Stage 1

First, let's do an example together. Download and open the Maple file,

substitution.mws.

It will help to also open a new internet window with the letter frequency table.

Let's also cut and paste the CIPHER text into a Word document, make a duplicate copy of the file (so we can make mistakes) and use the Find & Replace feature of Word to convert to plain text. Remember to tell Word to match the case of the letters it is replacing.

Stage 2

Emina Alibegovic, a recent Utah Math Ph.D., TA-ed this week of ACCESS for me two years ago, and found an essay you might find interesting. She chopped it up into seven parts and encrypted each piece using who knows what sort of substitution. According to your group number, download the section of the essay into Word and start deciphering!

Stage 3

After all our hard work, let's read our results outloud to the class to hear the whole story.

If this story is indeed interesting to you and you would like to find out more on women in Mathematics, please visit the Women in Math Project, maintained by Professor Marie Vitulli of the University of Oregon. This is the most comprehensive site on the subject. (Thanks to Emily Putnam, who helped ACCESS out last year, for this link.)