Ryan Fox

This is a Museum of Math Rosenthal Prize (innovation in mathematics) finalist lesson! This lesson teaches students how to decrypt a message written in a Caesar Cipher using frequency analysis. Students only need to know how to fill out a histogram, which can be itself part of the lesson. The lesson starts with the history of the first encrypted messages and finally challenges students to be a World War II codebreaker. Whichever pair can decode the messages first will succeed! Perfect observation

Students make a hypothesis about circles and chords and then test their hypothesis to see it is is incorrect, showing that math is about proof, not intuition.