Abstract: In 1949, after contributing to the effort to decrypt secret messages during World War II, Claude Shannon published a summary of his ideas on mathematical cryptography. Entropy is a concept from information theory, a field which Shannon pioneered. Entropy measures the uncertainty of a random variable. This talk will give an overview of Shannon's application of entropy to private key cryptography. In particular, we will discuss what conclusions can be drawn about messages encrypted using a simple substitution cipher, much like the cryptograms that you might solve in the Sunday paper.

Zoom link: https://wwu-edu.zoom.us/j/91006020487?pwd=SiswcEoxNkZTUVIyNGJWcHRmbDFRdz09

Meeting ID: 910 0602 0487
Passcode: entropy