Have you ever wondered how your information is protected? How President Obama might send Putin a message he doesn't want other world leaders to be able to see? Have you ever wondered how math is used in the real world? By surveying historic and modern cryptosystems, this course will provide students with a broad knowledge base for how information is protected. Topics include: Caesar Cipher, Vigenere Cipher, Public Key systems, RSA, Secret Sharing, and additional topics as time permits.

One cool thing about numbers is that they just keep going. For any number you give me, I can give you one that's bigger by simply adding one. But if I asked you to name a big number (none of that infinity garbage), you might say something like "The number of hairs on my head" or "the number of grains of sand in the Sahara". While these numbers are big to us, they are pretty small in a mathematical sense. I want to tell you about TRULY big numbers. Incomprehensibly big numbers. Numbers so big that even computers can't deal with them. This course will focus on computer science, computation theory, the need for mathematical rigor, and number's so large that if you imagined them as a continuous string of digits your head would literally collapse into a black hole killing us all. That last part's not a joke. I'll prove it to you. We'll talk about infinity at the end if time permits.