mathschallenge.net

Problem

At school, Bill Speareshake was always the class dunce, but in recent years he has met great success as a poet and playwright. Many people believe that his equally recent involvement with people in high places is a mere coincidence, but others suspect that the real genius behind his works is none other than the esoteric figure Crispin Bacon. In fact, the skeptics believe that his latest masterpiece, in the form of a short poem, contains the identity of the true author.

a doZen, A grOsS, And a SCorE
pLUS 3 TIMES ThE squArE RooT of 4
DiViDED by 7
PLUS 5 Times 11
is 9 sqUareD, AnD NOT a BIT more

Can you solve the mystery?

Solution

The clue to solving this was in the pretext, as it is based on one of Francis Bacon's famous cipher systems. We begin by splitting the text into blocks of five and removing spaces and punctuation. We then replace normal characters with zeroes and large characters with ones, to form binary strings. A brief introduction to binary strings can be found in the Code Breaking Library. Alternatively you could do a search for more in-depth information on decimal/binary conversion on the internet, decimal binary conversion (Google search link). The binary strings are converted into decimal numbers and these represent the alphabetical position of the letters that form the secret message.

adoZe	00010	2	B
nAgrO	01001	9	I
sSAnd	01100	12	L
aSCor	01100	12	L
EpLUS	10111	23	W
3TIME	01111	15	O
SThEs	11010	26	Z
quArE	00101	5	E
RooTo	10010	18	R
f4DiV	00101	5	E
iDEDb	01110	14	N
y7PLU	01111	15	O
S5Tim	10100	20	T
es11i	00010	2	B
s9sqU	00001	1	A
areDA	00011	3	C
nDNOT	01111	15	O
aBITm	01110	14	N
ore

The secret message reading as, BILL WOZ ERE NOT BACON.

Some people believe that Lord Francis Bacon was the real author of the works of William Shakespeare and the debate will continue, I'm sure, without resolve. There are compelling arguments on both sides, with each camp claiming that only a fool would believe the contrary. A search on the internet with the keywords: baconian shakespeare (Google search link), will produce numerous documents discussing this issue.