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Is it a multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, or maybe even trans-disciplinary? What are the basis to describe each kind? I mean, how can we infer by which disciplinary field we can describe the cryptography?

I got an answer saying that it is multi-disciplinary because it contains multiple subjects like information theory, mathematics… what about the other fields?

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Sorry, I don't really understand your question. Could you elaborate a bit? (The question has an edit button.) It also looks at the border to off-topic, though I can't say for sure. –  Paŭlo Ebermann Mar 24 '13 at 22:51

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up vote 3 down vote accepted

It is multidisciplinary because it's a branch of mathematics and freely borrows from other branches such as statistics or algorithms.

I'm not so sure if it's cross-disciplinary. Although companies that make secure products (ie. products that use crypto facilities) employ cryptographers, cryptography in itself is a purely theoretical discipline that doesn't concern itself with implementation details that much (but Crypto.SE often does).

You could say it's interdisciplinary because it is a parent of quantum cryptography but I can't think of a justification for calling it cross-disciplinary.

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Wikipedia has all the definitions you need by the way. –  rath Mar 22 '13 at 8:30

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