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Below is a rough schedule of how I expect this class to proceed and important dates.  You can expect to see this schedule revised as the course develops. You are expected to show up for lectures and be aware of any changes to the tentative schedule that I am providing for you here.

Lecture Schedule	Topics	Remarks
Tuesday, January 3	Introduction-Caesar, Vigenere
Thursday, January 5	classical ciphers- Rectangular transposition, homophonic, Playfair, ADFGVX, snail
Tuesday, January 10		Quiz 1
Thursday, January 12	classical ciphers- Hill, Vernam, probability theory
Tuesday, January 17	conditional probability, independence, dependence
Thursday, January 19	probability theory and the game of craps
Tuesday, January 24		Quiz 2
Thursday, January 26	Monty Hall paradox, monkey words, test for monoalphabetic substitution
Tuesday, January 31	index of coincidence, convex inequality, breaking rectangular transposition
Thursday, February 2	breaking rect trans, breaking Vigenere, breaking monoalphabetic, ADFGVX, begin entropy
Tuesday February 7	expected value, entropy
Thursday, February 9	entropy, unicity distance
Tuesday, February 14		Quiz 3
Thursday, February 16	unicity distance, trees and encoding
February 21 and 23	reading week
Tuesday, February 28	entropy, trees, perfect secrecy
Thursday, March 1	perfect secrecy and begin number theory
Tuesday March 6		Quiz 4
Thursday, March 8	number theory and RSA
Tuesday, March 13	RSA, Euler-Fermat, Legendre and Jacobi symbols, primality testing
Thursday, March 15	Jacobi symbol, Diffie-Hellman
Tuesday March 20		Quiz 5
Thursday, March 22	Diffie-Hellman, primitive roots, El Gamal
Tuesday, March 27	Knapsack, Feistel, DES
Thursday, March 29	practice for the final

The grade for this course will be based on three components listed on the grades page.  The final grade will be curved and will not be based on the absolute system of reference.

:Home:	:Links:	:Handouts:	:Schedule:	:Grades:

The following is a list of main topics that we covered from my schedule when I taught the class last year. You can expect that we follow this list in roughly the same order.

Introduction
Classical ciphers
     Caesar
     Vigenere
     Rectangular transposition
     homophonic
     Playfair
     Hill
     Vernam
     ADFGVX
     snail
     Morse code
probability theory
the game of craps
infinite monkeys
probability and vigenere
probability and rectangular transposition
index of coincidence
breaking monoalphabetic substitution
Introduction to entropy
Entropy
unicity distance
trees and file compression
number theory
gcd
solving ax=b (mod n)
computing a^b (mod n)
Euler-Fermat theorem
RSA
primality testing
factorization
discrete log
Diffie-Hellman
Knapsack
DES
Feistel cyphers
El Gamal
digital signatures
cyclotomic polynomials and primitive roots
anonymous chatting