Cryptography

In this quarter of statistics, we were assigned to come up with our own projects, whether those projects were improving the course, finding new and interesting data, or some thing else was completely up to you.  The big project that I started was trying to find a way to easily teach the basic concepts of cryptography and how you can use statistics, in addition to some basic math, to crack some elementary ciphers.  I will be the first to admit that when I started out on this project I knew next to nothing about creating or breaking ciphers, so I had to do a lot of research on types of ciphers, how they work, some basic number theory, and the processes you must under go in order to analyze and break the cipher.  As soon I had a good amount of reach done, I started creating a power point to summarize what I'd learned, in hopes of using it teach others.  This power point is, at this point, still a work in progress, and I hope to eventually expand upon it, creating a video series to teach the concepts necessary in cryptography and cryptanalysis.




Through this project I have learned a lot about the applications of statistics and other forms of math.  I think that it is a good thing to be teaching students how math can be used or has been used in the past, other wise they will think is math is just a class you have to take that will never be used beyond an elementary school level, cryptography is good example of this.  Since this project is still a work in progress, I hope to learn and more and add to/expand upon it in order to better teach others, as well as to better myself.