Top secret!
Top secret!
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Prof. Dr Andrea Peter-Koop (Institute of Mathematics)
In our everyday lives, numbers are frequently used to encode information. You’ll find them, for example, on goods in the supermarket (so-called barcodes) or on books. They also secure locks on houses and bank safes. We want to investigate how such numerical codes are structured and, above all, how secure they actually are. 
Incidentally, the Roman general Julius Caesar developed a cipher to prevent the enemy Gauls from reading letters containing orders to his soldiers. Even today, spies and secret agents still use complex mathematical numerical ciphers in their work to transmit secret messages. We want to examine the structure of various types of ciphers and decode a secret text ourselves. In doing so, we’ll explore, amongst other things, how one can become rich using prime numbers and why even intelligence services are interested in such numbers. Please bring paper and pens with you!