cryptography

Bitcoin is a digital currency that isn't regulated by any kind of central authority. The structure which allows this decentralisation is called blockchain. But how, and how well, does it work?

Can you encode a message so that errors in transmission are automatically corrected?

A quick look at the role of mathematics in communication — from making and breaking codes to making sure messages arrive intact.

A team of computer scientists has found a weakness in the world's most popular anonymity service.

How a special kind of curve can keep your data safe.

Marcus du Sautoy talks about football, cryptography, and numbers.

The universal machine is a musical about Alan Turing, the mathematician and WWII code breaker who was convicted of homosexuality in the 1950s, chemically castrated as a result, and died young in mysterious circumstances. How do you turn such a story, and the maths in it, into a musical? We talked to writer and director David Byrne, Richard Delaney, who plays Turing, and Assistant Director Natalie York.

If you are prone to forgetting your passwords, you're not alone. To make sure we remember all our passwords, many of us take measures that defeat the purpose. These include, as studies have shown, using the same password for everything or writing them down on post-it notes and sticking them to our computer. But such sloppiness makes easy work for evil agents out to steal our data and identities. Now physicists from the US and Germany have devised a safer way of using passwords that takes account of the human need for memorability.
Alan Turing is the father of computer science and contributed significantly to the WW2 effort, but his life came to a tragic end. Stefan Kopieczek explores his story.
Crack codes, solve a mystery and even win prizes in the University of Southampton's National Cipher Challenge.
Fame, glory, and more importantly prizes are on offer in the National Cipher Challenge.
The Riemann Hypothesis is probably the hardest unsolved problem in all of mathematics, and one of the most important. It has to do with prime numbers - the building blocks of arithmetic. Nick Mee, together with Sir Arthur C. Clarke, tells us about the patterns hiding inside numbers.
  • Want facts and want them fast? Our Maths in a minute series explores key mathematical concepts in just a few words.