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Simon Singh's parents emigrated from the Punjab in India to Britain in 1950. He grew up in Wellington, Somerset, and then went to Imperial College, London, where he studied physics, before completing a PhD in particle physics at Cambridge University and at CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva.
In 1990, Simon joined BBC Television's Science Department as a producer and director on programmes such as Tomorrow's World and Horizon. In 1996 he directed Fermat's Last Theorem, a BAFTA-winning documentary about the world's most notorious mathematical problem. This was the subject of his first book, also entitled Fermat's Last Theorem, the first book about mathematics to become a No.1 bestseller in the UK!
In 1997 Simon began working on his second book, The Code Book, a history of codes and codebreaking. As well as explaining the science of codes and describing the impact of cryptography on history, the book showed that cryptography today is more important than ever before. After all, we live in the Information Age, and one of the best ways to protect information is to encode it.
The Code Book has resulted in a return to television for Simon, who is presenting Channel 4's five-part series The Science of Secrecy. The subjects of the stories in the series range from the deciphering of the letters that sealed the fate of Mary Queen of Scots to the coded Zimmermann Telegram that changed the course of the First World War. Other programmes discuss how two great nineteenth-century geniuses raced to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs and how modern encryption can guarantee privacy on the internet.
Accompanying the series is a book entitled The Science of Secrecy, which expands on the material in the programmes. The book is published by Fourth Estate at £14.99.
To find out more about Simon, his books and his forthcoming lectures you can visit his website at www.simonsingh.com.
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