I tivoed the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures that were on TV over the Christmas period and although they didn’t go in to depth about anything in particular they were quite entertaining and interesting. I’ve always had a love of maths so it was nice to see the subject get some TV time. Normally the only mathematical programming on TV is the number round on Countdown.
The 2006 lectures were presented by Marcus du Sautoy who’s as close to being a show biz mathematician as you’re likely to get. The lectures were called “THE NUM8ER MY5TERIES”. Each one was quite good but the one that I hadn’t got around to watching until yesterday I enjoyed particularly. It was called “The case of the uncrackable code”.
An interesting bit of trivia that came out of this was that Coldplay used Baudot Code on the front of their X&Y album but encoded the album name incorrectly so that it actually reads X9Y. Sure enough, this is explained in the Wikipedia article. Even though Coldplay got the code wrong, it’s nice that they tried to do something with an album cover other than get a nice or cool picture on it. The code they used was a little more sophisticated than the one used by Front 242 for their 1993 album 06:21:03:11 Up Evil.
Now, I love maths and I’ve always been quite intrigued by all of the code making and breaking that has gone on throughout history. Last April I even went to Bletchley Park which is famous for cracking the Enigma cipher. At that point they were still rebuilding the Bombe, which is the machine designed by Alan Turing to help deciphering Enigma messages.
In the lecture, they had an Enigma machine and used it to encipher a message. This was then sent via morse code to Bletchley Park where they used the Bombe to decode it and report back to the audience. This process seemed to take around 20 minutes. It would be difficult to impress on the audience the difficulties involved in getting to the point where that was possible. The audiences tend to be in the 11 to 18 year old range and I doubt my interest would have been piqued when I was at the lower end of that range.
Read the full article here
Recommended Comments