Roger Williams was the founder of Rhode Island, and during the last years of his life, he filled the margins of a book, An Essay Towards the Reconciling of Differences Among Christians, with a series of notes on various subjects.
Unfortunately, he invented his own set of symbols that no one understood, so the 300-year-old text couldn’t be deciphered by anyone.
Struggling faculty members opened up the challenge of decoding the book to students. A group of undergraduates, led by a math major, undertook a systematic analysis of the symbols.
Initial statistical analysis was unsuccessful, but one of the students figured out that Williams had based his codes on the shorthand he’d learned as a court stenographer in England.
This new insight led to a full decoding of the writing, which apparently covers historical geography, medicine, and infant baptism.
Unfortunately, he invented his own set of symbols that no one understood, so the 300-year-old text couldn’t be deciphered by anyone.
Struggling faculty members opened up the challenge of decoding the book to students. A group of undergraduates, led by a math major, undertook a systematic analysis of the symbols.
Initial statistical analysis was unsuccessful, but one of the students figured out that Williams had based his codes on the shorthand he’d learned as a court stenographer in England.
This new insight led to a full decoding of the writing, which apparently covers historical geography, medicine, and infant baptism.
