Very interesting facts about number theory, the base of Cryptography. Although I'm mathematician, I've learnt new important facts in this course (especially those that refer to history or computation, including algorithms like trial division, Miller Rabin and RSA).

However, a couple mistakes were found in the correct answers of the graded assessments.

In my opinion, the slides are nice, but not enough. There should be a formal document to explain in more detail and more rigorously each step of the mathematical procedures, since several of them cannot be explained in a video or in a slide.

Also, the assessment should include more mathematical and programming exercises to put in practice the things we've learnt through the course.

To conclude, very nice and indispensable content, but not as excellent and well prepared as in the first course lessons.

God, math, but the information is excelent

Good course, but would like some more exercises to implement the mathematics learnt.

Introduction assez complète aux mathématiques nécessaires à la cryptologie, avec des exemples précis en fin de cours autour de l'algorithme RSA.

Found this very useful. Thank you.

Excelent!

I love the way that this course presents the basic group theory and number theory concepts central to so much cryptography. For example, I've tried to teach myself about the the Chinese Remainder Theorem and its use through my own self-study, but never really grokked it until this course. The same is true of primality testing.

The lectures really are outstanding, and the practice and graded assessments are extremely well constructed to help one get a real sense of what the theorems and algorithms do. The numbers in many of the problems are chosen to make certain things clear if you do those problems "by hand".

My only criticisms are not about substance, and are things that may not apply to your sessions or have been addressed by the time you are reading this. There were some errors in the early problem sets, the course slides are distributed at powerpoint only (and not PDF), and during my session there was virtually no interaction with staff or fellow students on the forums. These are minor issues, probably specific to the session I was in, but in combination are why I'm rating this four stars instead of five.

It is hard for me to assess how accessible this course is for most of the people who might take it. I found it "easy", but I've been doing self-study of this sort of stuff for a while. I also think that this is a "what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" sort of things. I got a lot out of it, but that is because I did the exercises both by hand, and then also wrote code to solve those same sorts of problems with bigger numbers.