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The clattering of typewriters and the hum of early computers hidden inside a small manor in the English countryside was the site of one of WWII's most pivotal battles: codebreaking. At Bletchley Park, brilliant minds worked tirelessly to decrypt enemy messages.
Code-Breakers: Bletchley Park's Lost Heroes. Real mathematics has no effect on war. This is a British mathematician called Bill Tutte. You won't have heard of him, but in 1942 he pulled off what many believe was the greatest intellectual feat of World War Two.
Dec 27, 2017 · William Friedman and Elizebeth Smith Friedman. Wikimedia Commons - CC0. One married couple was responsible for the foundations of modern code breaking, and the principles that gave the...
- Britain
- Alan Turing
- William Thomas Tutte
- Germany
- Marian Rejewski
- America
- Late Recognition
The center of codebreaking for the Allies was at Bletchley Park in England. Run by the British Intelligence, this top secret base was located in a 19th-century mansion in the English countryside which housed specialist equipment. Bletchley Park attracted some of the best minds, bringing together people who would apply themselves to the important wo...
The name which first comes to mind when we talk about code breaking is Alan Turing. Turing was a mathematician and a graduate of both Cambridge and Princeton Universities. In 1939, he joined the staff at Bletchley Park as a cryptanalyst. There he turned his great analytical and logical skills to the task of deciphering German codes. He is credited ...
Less well known but also very important was William Thomas Tutte. Throughout the war, the Germans used a number of complex codes for communication. One of these was the Lorenz cipher. This was a stream of code produced by the Lorenz cipher machine which allowed the Germans to communicate safely by radio. Bill Tutte, as he was known, was born in Eng...
Less is known of the German codebreakers. Much of this kind of work was carried out across different departments, so there was no equivalent of Bletchley Park. As a result, they were less effective than the Allies because people were working separately from each other and not sharing the results. They did, however, have some success in breaking bot...
Shortly after the invasion of Poland by Germany in 1939, a group of cryptanalysts were evacuated to France. The group consisted of employees from the Polish Cipher Bureau who had been working on the German Enigma code. Among these was Marian Rejewski, a mathematician who had attended a secret course in cryptology after university. Rejewski’s work o...
Once the US entered the war in 1942, they also contributed to the effort of code breaking and did a lot of important work on Japanese ciphers. One of the features of American cryptography is that many of the top code breakers were women. The American military actively recruited from women’s colleges. This may have been because, despite the high lev...
Due to the secretive nature of their work, many cryptanalysts never received recognition for their work until many years later. But their contribution to the war effort was hugely significant. Some even credit Britain’s cracking the Enigma code with bringing the war to an end as much as two years early. When you consider how much human suffering th...
Sep 6, 2018 · While computing pioneer Alan Turing was breaking Nazi communication in England, eleven thousand women, unbeknownst to their contemporaries and to most of us who constitute their posterity, were breaking enemy code in America — unsung heroines who helped defeat the Nazis and win WWII.
Jun 19, 2012 · His bombes turned Bletchley Park into a codebreaking factory. As early as 1943 Turing's machines were cracking a staggering total of 84,000 Enigma messages each month - two messages every minute.
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Oct 10, 2017 · Over the last 100 years, women have had significant, high-level roles in breaking secret codes – from Nazi ciphers to the secret messages of Al Capone’s gang – but their contribution is only ...
