Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Gold-Bug' introduced me to cryptography

The Gold-Bug: Edgar Allan Poe's story that taught me about cryptography (2024)

In middle school in India, I read Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Gold-Bug,' a story that sparked my interest in cryptography. Poe wrote it in 1843 to demystify secret writing, showing that substitution ciphers could be cracked with logical reasoning and letter frequencies. The story inspired Claude Shannon, the father of information theory. I also discovered that many published versions contain a typo that turns 'forty' into 'fosty,' but the original is flawless.