from Princeton University Press.

This book was sent to me by the publisher as a review copy.

This is a book of some impressive magnitude, both in terms of the time span that it covers (being millennia), as well as the ways in which it discusses the context and content of the ciphers, most of which, as the title suggests, are unsolved. The book starts with perhaps the most mysterious of all unbroken ciphers: The Voynich Manuscript (the entirety of which can be found here). This story in itself is perhaps the most fascinating in the history of all encrypted documents, and that we still don’t know if it truly contains anything of interest, or is just a cleverly constructed (though several hundred year old) hoax makes it all the more intriguing.

The writing rather effortlessly weaves between the potential origin stories, the history of the ownership of the manuscript and the attempts to decode it. This is the case for the majority of the ciphers within the book, which means that an intriguing background is given for each piece of writing, be it a cipher left on the body of an unknown man in Australia, the codes sent to a newspaper under the guise of the Zodiac killer, or codes set up as pure challenges for the world’s best code-breaking minds.

Throughout the book, enough information is given to the reader that they may be able to go away and attempt to decode some of these ciphers themselves, sometimes with ideas that Bauer has himself come up with as to how they may have been encoded. These hints are given in the knowledge that more brain power and computer power may be enough to break through some of the deepest mysteries of these so-far unintelligible pieces of writing.

Bauer does not shy away from the mathematics of cryptology, spending a good amount of time throughout the text talking about information content, statistical analysis, and encoding methods in real detail. The mathematics should be accessible however to anyone with more or less a good highschool level of mathematics, and even someone who does not will still be able to get the flavour of the techniques being discussed.

The book is also sprinkled with ciphers that have been decoded, adding an extra layer of mystery through the book as in general the reveal is left until the end, as to whether, and indeed how, each piece was finally cracked, sometimes through sheer brute force, and sometimes through amazing intuition and guesswork.

Together with Simon Singh’s The Code Book, Unsolved! makes for a perfect pairing of the how, the why and the what of code-making and code-breaking. The writing of Unsolved! is really effortlessly flowing, and although the book is over 500 pages long, it is an easy one to devour as you get more and more wrapped up in each new mystery. I would highly recommend this book for anyone with an interest in suspense, crime, mathematics, history, law, computing or simply human nature. This is a really fun and very well written book.

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I have not had a chance to watch these, but I see that Craig Bauer has a lecture online precisely on the topic of Unsolved ciphers here.