Precalculus: Cryptology and Matrices

Objectives

• Students will use their knowledge of matrices and their inverses to encode and decode messages, solve systems of equations, and write equations for messages.
• Students will be able to input their data into matrices and perform calculations on them.
• Students be able to interpret the results of their calculations.
• Students will utilize different methods to check the results of their calculations and verify their solutions.

Vocabulary

• decode
• determinant
• encode
• identity matrix
• inverse matrix
• matrix

About the Lesson

This lesson involves using matrices to encode and decode a message.
As a result, students will:

• Learn how matrices can be applied to real world problems.
• Learn that (some) matrix multiplications can be "undone" by multiplying by an inverse matrix.