Unsolved Mysteries
- Here’s the Wired Magazine article on Kryptos: “Mission Impossible: The Code Even the CIA Can’t Crack,” Steven Levy, April 2009.
- James Sanborn has another interesting cryptography sculpture call the Cyrillic Projector. Below you can see a video project one of my former students did on this second sculpture.
- The Wikipedia entry on the Voynich Manuscript is a good introduction to its weirdness and the various attempts over the years to figure it out. Researchers Daniel and Sarah Drucker have posted hi-res photos of the manuscript on Flickr, too.
- I mentioned Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in class as an example of a mathematical problem that had gone unsolved for hundreds of years. Here’s a nice interview with Wiles about his work from PBS NOVA Online.
Probability and Combinatorics
- If you find confusing the probability and counting problems we’ve seen lately, you might watch a few Khan Academy videos on these topics. You might start with the first video in Khan’s series on probability, then watch a few of the subsequent videos. Here’s a list of all his videos on probability. The ones on permutations and combinations are particularly relevant to this course. I’ve embedded them below.
Image: “Antipodes” by Flickr user Fotomoe, Creative Commons licensed.
Leave a Reply