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Welcoming back the highly successful Alan Turing Cryptography Competition!

02 Dec 2015

And introducing 2016 MathsBombe!

Alan Turing

Do you know anyone in secondary school or sixth form who likes cracking codes or solving puzzles? Or maybe you just know pupils who want to win some prizes? Registration for the 2016 Alan Turing Cryptography Competition (Year 11 and below in England and Wales, S4 in Scotland and Year 12 in N. Ireland) and the 2016 MathsBombe (Year 13 and below in England and Wales, S6 in Scotland and Year 14 in N. Ireland) is now open! 

The 2016 Alan Turing Cryptography Competition is now in its fifth year! It’s an online competition run by the University's School of Mathematics. Every one to two weeks a new chapter of the story is released and there are six chapters in total. Each chapter has a new cryptographic puzzle to solve. The team (one to four people) that solves the chapter’s puzzle the fastest wins a prize, but there will also be five 'spot prizes' for every chapter chosen at random from teams who submit the correct answers! At the end of the competition we will host the Alan Turing Cryptography Day on Wednesday, 25 April 2016 with everything from a live cryptography challenge to a prize ceremony for the competition winners. It’s not to be missed!

For older sixth form pupils, there is the 2016 MathsBombe! This is a new online competition, with two mathematical puzzles being released every fortnight. With four sets of puzzles in total, participants will be competing against other students from across the UK. The puzzles will be quirky, fun and cover the full spectrum of Mathematics; they will not be directly related to the A-Level syllabus and will be unlike problems in, say, the UKMT. Instead, students will need to use their problem-solving skills and be able to ‘think outside the box’ – valuable skills for students going on to study STEM subjects at university.

The Alan Turing Cryptography Competition begins on Monday, 25 January 2016, with MathsBombe starting two weeks earlier (Wednesday, 13 January 2016).

Registration is open now

To register, visit: