The Cracking Code Book: How to make it, break it, hack it, crack it

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Isaacson lays everything out with his usual lucid prose; it’s brisk and compelling and even funny throughout. In Isaacson's splendid saga of how big science really operates, curiosity and creativity, discovery and innovation, obsession and strong personalities, competitiveness and collaboration, and the beauty of nature all stand out.

The most authoritative and revealing examination yet of the way intelligence--of all kinds--was instrumental in defeating Japan. Photograph: Jeff Chiu/Associated Press/EPA View image in fullscreen Jennifer Doudna with her Nobel gold medal, December 2020. In The Hidden History of Code Breaking, Sinclair McKay explores these uncrackable codes, secret cyphers and hidden messages from across time to tell a new history of a secret world.

At the very least this is a demonstration of the human need to see meaning and pattern in random things. Kids of all ages love learning about and using secret codes and there are books on this list for kids aged 5-16+. I dare you to find a more diverse, a more mind-blowing, a more intriguing collection of stories about codes and code breaking. A mix of maths, cryptography and puzzles from the teenager who hit the headlines with her encryption algorithm.

For more than a decade, I led a team of experts trying to decipher the levels of meaning in the pop culture works of Dan Brown.Reading this book has clarified my illusions that older cryptograms were simple, and deeply increased my respect for pencil and paper methods. Their existence must have felt very far from heroic at the time, and compared to the high-profile codebreakers, they’ve been largely disregarded ever since. For instance, Robert Harris’s nail-biting novel Enigma super-imposes a fictional espionage storyline over the facts.