ciphers

One of my favorite undergraduate courses was an optional elective on the topic of ciphers, starting with handwritten approaches and eventually moving on into mechanical and then digital cryptography. A few classes in the handwritten section started with the professor writing ciphertext on the board and inviting us to spend some time attempting to break it without knowledge of what the cipher actually was.

A while back I pledged to write a paper on a topic unrelated to my academic major for my Estonian fraternity. I never actually got around to doing this, but at the time of the pledge I had the ciphers course fresh in my head and thought it would more research would be interesting. So in the interest of actually making some progress on this, I thought writing a bit about handwritten ciphers here may be a good way to motivate myself. To ease into it, I’m starting with the most basic cipher I know of: the Caesar Cipher.