Mr Smith and Mr Jones are two maths teachers. By asking questions, the answers to which may be right or wrong, Mr Jones is able to find the number of the house Mr Smith lives in... Or not!
You have worked out a secret code with a friend. Every letter in the alphabet can be represented by a binary value.
Ask a friend to choose a number between 1 and 63. By identifying which of the six cards contains the number they are thinking of it is easy to tell them what the number is.
Decipher a simple code based on the rule C=7P+17 (mod 26) where C is the code for the letter P from the alphabet. Rearrange the formula and use the inverse to decipher automatically.
Crack this code which depends on taking pairs of letters and using two simultaneous relations and modulus arithmetic to encode the message.
Find 180 to the power 59 (mod 391) to crack the code. To find the secret number with a calculator we work with small numbers like 59 and 391 but very big numbers are used in the real world for this.
Here's a clearly explained solution for the problem which starts 'Take three unit circles...' What would happen if the problem asked you to take four or five or more unit circles?
Go to last month's problems to see more solutions.
An introduction to the ideas of public key cryptography using small numbers to explain the process. In practice the numbers used are too large to factorise in a reasonable time.
To avoid losing think of another very well known game where the patterns of play are similar.