Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Kominers’s Conundrums: Crack Caesar’s Favorite Code

Cryptograms look intimidating at first, but can be extremely satisfying once you unlock them.

May 16, 2020 at 11:25 AM UTC

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

A cryptic statue at CIA Headquarters has stumped solvers for decades.
Photographer: Carol M. Highsmith/Buyenlarge/Getty Images

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People have used codes and secret messages since time immemorial. They’ve been crucial in wartime, and in some sense underpin all our modern communications security.

They also make great puzzles.

In a cryptogram, you’re given a piece of text that’s been encoded somehow, and have to work out what it says. These can look intimidating at first, but can be extremely satisfying once you unlock them.