UCD Professor Gary McGuire with Sixth Year Students from Kylemore College during Maths Week at UCD.
Students got an insight into the maths behind iPods, DVDs and choosing a Lotto Quick Pick from UCD Professor Gary McGuire from the UCD School of Mathematical Sciences and the Claude Shannon Institute. The fascinating talk, held in the UCD Conway Institute, kicked off with a look at the science of secrecy and how Julius Caesar sent encrypted messages to his army using the “Caesar Cipher”!
The students were challenged to decrypt a coded message using a secret key before examining the complexity of encryption used nowadays for internet-based credit card transactions and downloading songs from iTunes.
“The famous mathematician Claude Shannon invented a new science called information theory,” said Professor McGuire. “This science explains that messages are composed of information and redundancy. The concept of redundancy is clearly illustrated by our ability to understand the text message “c u l8r” even though letters are missing from all of the words. Some letters are redundant, and some letters contain the information. Redundancy is taken out in the process of compression to make files smaller so large music files such as mp3s can be downloaded quickly.”
Professor McGuire also gave examples of the maths behind reducing the interference of a signal coming from a satellite and the noise caused by dust and dirt on a DVD. He added that it is a myth that people do not use maths in their everyday lives; the truth is that maths is all around us but often hidden beneath the surface.
