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I. OBJECTIVES:
II. OVERVIEW
III. DISCUSSION
Complete the table to find out how Caesar would encode the following
message:
Caesar’s message A T T A C K A T D A W N
B U
C V
Coded message D
For example, encoding the letter ‘A’ is 0+3=3, which is a ‘D’, coding ‘I’ is 8+3=11,
which is ‘L’.
However, you do have to be careful when you get to the end of the
alphabet, because there is no letter 26, so you have to go back to number 0. In
math we call this ‘MOD 26’, instead of writing 26, we go back to 0.
Thus, EGG is ciphered as 7-9-9 or HJJ.
SUN is ciphered as 21-23-16 0r VXQ.
YACHT is ciphered as 27-3-5-10-22 (since 27 is higher than 26, 27 is translated
as 1)…B-D-F-K-W.
In mod 26, the 57 is reduced to 5, or the letter F (recall that we take away
all the 26s). so the formula for a cipher number c# for each plain number
p# is GAF.
What is GAF is given and we want the original term, how do we do it?
Wait, I will give another two examples before revealing the secret… Here
the first line is the ISBN, the second is the series in which each number is multiplied
by its position, the third is the sum of these:
186-2307-369
1, 16, 18, 8, 15, 0, 49, 24, 54, 90
Sum: 275
0486-2566-42
0, 8, 24, 24, 10, 30, 42, 48, 36, 20
Sum: 242
Notice anything about all these sums that have been cooked out of the ISBN?
Have you spotted the pattern?
The calculation always gives a sum that’s divisible by 11. This is not an
amazing coincidence, but an example of cunning mathematical design.
It’s only the first nine digits that contain the information about the book. The
tenth digit is included just to make this total number extracted from ISBN divisible
by 11. You might have spotted that some books have an X instead of a number
as their tenth digit. Because these nine digits are already divisible by 11.
1 0 1 1 1 = 16 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 23
- 1 0 1 0 1 = 16 + 4 + 1 = 21
0 0 0 1 0 = =2
Example 2:
0 1 0 1 = 4+1= 5
x 1 0 1 1 = 8 + 2 + 1 = x 11
0 1 0 1 55
0 1 0 1
0 0 0 0
+ 0 1 0 1
0 1 1 0 1 1 1 = 32 + 16 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 55