Writing systems in fiction Back in part 2, we looked at some writing systems that were invented rather than developing naturally over a long time. There are many more invented writing systems, namely those invented for fictional languages. J. R. R. Tolkien was a pioneer of fictional languages, being a real-world language expert himself. His…
Tag: cipher
Ways of scrambling a message: Permutation polynomials over the integers mod n through the lens of monoalphabetic substitution ciphers
When Julius Caesar was on his military campaign in Gaul, he sent coded messages by courier back to Rome using a simple cipher. The so-called Caesar cipher is a letter shift by three places. In other words, every instance of the letter A gets replaced with the letter D, B gets replaced with E, C…