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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 8	Introduction-Caesar, Vigenere
Thursday, January 10	classical ciphers- Rectangular transposition, homophonic, Playfair, ADFGVX, snail
Tuesday, January 15		Quiz 1
Thursday, January 17	classical ciphers- Hill, Vernam, probability theory
Tuesday, January 22	probability theory and the game of craps
Thursday, January 24	infinite monkeys
Tuesday, January 29		Quiz 2
Thursday, January 31	index of coincidence, test for monoalphabetic, a basic inequality
Tuesday February 5	breaking vigenere and breaking rectangular transposition
Thursday, February 7	breaking monoalphabetic, and ADFGVX?
Tuesday February 12	Entropy, information and weighing coins
Thursday, February 14		Quiz 3
Tuesday February 19 and 21	reading week
Tuesday February 26	unicity distance
Thursday, February 28	trees, encoding and entropy
Tuesday March 5	perfect secrecy
Thursday, March 7	review of entropy, from "classical" to "modern" cryptopgraphy
Tuesday March 12		Quiz 4
Thursday, March 14	modular arithmetic, euclidean algorithm, Euler-Fermat
Tuesday March 19
Thursday, March 21
Tuesday March 26		Quiz 5
Thursday, March 28
Tuesday April 2
Thursday, April 4

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.

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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. In fact you can see the schedule for last year.

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