“Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart’s content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin.”
This is a great book, and a fitting title for the crypto-sphere. Neal Stephenson pulls out all the stops in this one, which I think is his strongest work. It's a fascinating and complex novel about both code making and code breaking. Half the novel revolves around the mathematical genius and cryptographer Lawrence Waterhouse, a friend of Alan Turing, who is involved with breaking the Nazi's Enigma code. The other portion is about his grandson Randy, a computer hacker, who finds himself in all sorts of trouble with governments, multinational corporations, and secret organizations while setting up a data haven in Southeast Asia. This one's a real page-turner, folks. Here is the first printing from 1999:
Stephenson has numerous speculative novels, exploring topics of mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. His latest, Seveneves, is fantastic as well.
More info here:
http://www.rarebooksleuth.com/featured/cryptonomicon-neal-stephenson-first-edition-first-printing