The course is now complete and was a smashing success! Thanks again to Bob Lewand for sharing with us. Enjoy the pictures from our time together.
Can you keep a secret? One can imagine that from the very outset human beings have held information that they wished to share with some, yet keep secret from others. Certainly cryptography, or secret writing, has a role to play in modern political and commercial correspondence. Anyone who has ever entered a credit card number into a text box on a secure web site has actually participated in cryptography, perhaps unwittingly.
In this course, designed for those with absolutely no experience in the subject, we will investigate techniques of encryption and decipherment along with the mathematical underpinnings of these systems. We will discuss various symmetric encryption schemes (affine, keyword, the Vigenère Square, Playfair's System and Hill's System) as well as the RSA implementation of public key cryptography. Students will have ample opportunity to encrypt, decrypt and decipher messages as part of the course.
An individual with a background in some elementary number theory and at least a rudimentary familiarity with computing (a programming language, or Maple, or even Excel) will be sufficiently prepared to understand the material in this course.
Robert Edward Lewand received his BS in mathematics from the University of Dayton and his PhD in mathematics from the University of Virginia. He is the author of Cryptological Mathematics and co-author of two other books: Expert Systems Development and Intelligent Systems Design. He has delivered numerous talks and published extensively in professional journals, largely in the area of expert systems and artificial intelligence. He has been the recipient of several scholarship and teaching awards, most recently the John M. Smith Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching (Maryland-Virginia-DC Section of the Mathematical Association of America, 2002).
Please visit the online registration page
to enroll in this summer's short course. Please submit a check for
$150 (payable to Capital University) to the address below.
Jon Stadler
Department of Mathematics
and Computer Science
2199 E. Main St.
Columbus, OH 43209
To register by mail or fax, please contact Jon Stadler at jstadler@capital.edu
or (614) 236-6905. Registration deadline is June 20, 2003 (As of
June 24, there is plenty of space available - you may still register!)
Dormitory housing is available beginning July 15. Single rooms are available for $32 per night and doubles are available for $16 nightly. A meal plan is available for $15.85 per day (this may be broken down per meal) or registrants may arrange their own meals. A picnic or banquet is planned for Thursday evening. To indicate that you will be using dormitory housing, please indicate "yes" in the appropriate space on the registration page. You will be contacted soon after to confirm plans.
Details about a Thursday dinner/picnic will be announced at a later
date.