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Garmt de Vries
- Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864, English: Journey to the centre of the Earth) starts with the deciphering of a cryptogram, using a simple transposition. See chapters 2--5.
- Mathias Sandorf (1885) also starts out with a message encrypted by transposition, but slightly more complicated, with the use of a grid. See vol. 1, ch. 4.
- La jangada (1881, English: Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon) is all about cryptography. The first lines of the novel consist of the cryptogram to be solved. In the end, a man's life depends on the information in this document, and several chapters are spent trying to decipher it. The system used is a Vigenere system, where each letter of the clear text can be represented by different letters in the cryptotext, depending on its position. The solution is found in the nick of time, when the name of the document's author is found out. This yields the key to the cryptogram, and the protagonist's life is saved. When this novel was first serialised before appearing as a volume, a math student apparently solved the riddle before the necessary clue was given or even hinted at. Jules Verne went to see the student, who explained how he had done it. Verne was much impressed. The method used by the student is not known. It may have been something like Kasiski counting, or using a probable word approach.
- Aventures de trois Russes et de trois Anglais (1872, English: Meridiana) is about an Anglo-Russian team of astronomers who set out to measure a meridian in southern Africa. Chapter 4 gives all the gory details of trigonometry, along with a history of the metre, and why it is important to measure a meridian. One of the characters is an absent-minded mathematician, who wanders off into the wild for days and is almost eaten by crocodiles, because he is verifying the logarithmic tables of James Wolston (ch. 9).
- In Hector Servadac (1877, English: Off on a comet), a group of people is taken away by a comet that collides with the Earth. One of them is a French astronomer, who is often compleely absorbed in his calculations. At one point, he gives a lecture on how to calculate the mass, density, etc. of their comet. See vol.2 , ch. 8.
- Mirifiques aventures de Maître Antifer (1894) is based on a geometrical problem. Three characters inherit an immense treasure, which is buried on an island. Each time they receive a longitude that they have to combine with a latitude in the possession of another heir to find the location of a new island. In the end, they have visited three islands, and find a document that has become illegible. There are some traces of text: "it suffices... circumference... pole...". The location of the last island is the centre of the circle through all three islands. It is a bit silly that they determine this final location using only a globe and a ruler, but the idea is nice.
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