Homomorphic encryption is pretty amazing. What they're proposing in this article is a bit like having a computer analyze an encrypted novel and determining which sentences were grammatically incorrect--without even knowing what the plaintext sentences were!
I'm just going to resubmit the bookmark directly to this page so I'll be sure it ends up publicly in the group.
This wasn't mentioned in Singh chapter 2, but it was created around the time period discussed in the chapter. (Plus, it's one of my favorite articles I've read in Wired so I really wanted to use it as a bookmark.) The article discusses the strategies used to break this cipher, some of which, such as frequency analysis, we have talked about in class. It's also just fascinating to read about the Oculists and their history.
Bernoulli numbers are a sequence of numbers important to the field of number theory, trigonometric expansions, and analysis. Ada Lovelace wrote a theoretical program to calculate these that would work on Charles Babbage's unfinished Analytical Engine. It's pretty interesting how Lovelace was a "leading figure" in the now massively male-dominated computer programming field, but didn't receive recognition for her work until fairly recently.