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The vanguard of mathematicians in cryptology. (English) Zbl 1375.94007

Summary: The intention of concealing the truth accompanied man from the dawning of civilization. Secrets of Egyptian priests, Eleusinian mysteries in Athens, hermeneutic philosophy, mysterious manuscripts of medieval alchemists – the value of knowledge was appreciated throughout history. Ways of protecting secrets also emerged very early; the earliest examples of the use of codes known to us today were found in ancient Egyptian inscriptions. The knowledge hidden behind the curtain of the code constituted a natural incentive to tear the veil down and to get to the truth. We do not know the names of the earliest cryptanalysts. Their achievements reached us only as a short mention of the ninth-century Arabian erudite, al-Kindi. He advised to calculate the frequency of appearance of characters in the cryptogram and to compare it with the frequency of characters in the long enough fragment of a text in the same language, in which the plaintext of the cryptogram has been written. It was an astonishingly modern approach and there would be nothing strange about describing it with a contemporary name of frequency analysis. However, in this way we would commit a sin of a completely ahistorical approach. There are few phenomena in the real world which cannot be described in the language of mathematics, or whose description in it would not prove worthwhile. However, this does not mean that those who described them for the first time automatically strived for mathematical formalism. Al-Kindi described an approach which today we would describe in mathematical terms, but he was not a mathematician himself. Since his time cryptology has been developing for a thousand years without any significant contact with the world of mathematics.

MSC:

94-03 History of information and communication theory
01A05 General histories, source books
94A60 Cryptography
01A60 History of mathematics in the 20th century
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