The Book Review Column 1 Books on Cryptography and Nothing Else 1. an Introductino to Mathematical Crytography 3 Opinion

In this column we review the following books. A combinatorial design is a set of sets of (say) {1,. .. , n} that have various properties, such as that no two of them have a large intersection. For what parameters do such designs exist? This is an interesting question that touches on many branches of math for both origin and application. 2. Combinatorics of Permutations by Miklós Bóna. Review by Gregory Taylor. Usually permutations are viewed as a tool in combinatorics. In this book they are considered as objects worthy of study in and of themselves. 3. Enumerative Combinatorics by Charalambos A. Charalambides. Review by Sergey Ki-taev, 2008. Enumerative combinatorics is a branch of combinatorics concerned with counting objects satisfying certain criteria. This is a far reaching and deep question. How can we view Geometry in terms that a computer can understand and deal with? This book helps answer that question. 5. Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau. Review by Richard Jankowski. What is the status of your privacy given current technology and law? Read this book and find out! Books I want Reviewed If you want a FREE copy of one of these books in exchange for a review, then email me at The origins of combinatorial design theory lie within recreational mathematics. With the work of Fisher and Yates in the 1930s it began to take on the character of a serious academic subject with deep connections to linear algebra, group theory, and number theory; there are applications to statistical experimentation, tournament scheduling, mathematical biology, algorithm design and analysis, and cryptography. The basic notion is that of a design, whereby one intends a pair (X, A) with X any set of elements (or points) and A any multiset of nonempty subsets of X (termed blocks). (If A is a set, then (X, A) is simple.) The focus of design theory is so-called BIBDs (Balanced Incomplete Block Designs) and the identification of necessary and sufficient conditions on v, k, and λ such that (v, k, λ)-BIBDs exist. (Steiner triple systems of order v are (v, 3, 1)-BIBDs.) The book under review has eleven chapters. Equivalence results, which anchor each of them, take the form " there exists a. .. if and only if there exists a " but almost invariably have constructive proofs showing that, given a. .. , …