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College of Education and Human Development - George Mason University

MATH 175: Mathematics of Cryptography: An Introduction

Important: For the most up-to-date information, refer to the official George Mason Course Catalog

General Information

Credits: 3

Description:

Every day, 143,000 terabytes of data are transferred across the internet, including financial transactions, medical records, and sensitive client data. Half of this traffic is secured through encryption, relying on mathematical algorithms such as the RSA to encode the data in a way that only the recipient can decode. In this class, we will see how cryptography works first-hand. We will start with classical ciphers (Atbash and Caesar ciphers) and develop our mathematical techniques and programming abilities until we are able to implement RSA from scratch. Topics covered in the course lead into the following majors: mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, and cyber security engineering. Offered by Mathematics. Limited to three attempts.
Recommended Prerequisite: B or better in a calculus course.
Schedule Type: Laboratory, Lecture
Grading:
This course is graded on the Undergraduate Regular scale.