Don't forget about people who were breakine enigma 'before it was cool', and they succeed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_%28cryptography%29 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski .
True, but this story has nothing to do with Engima.
Bill Tutte – The Lesser Known Codebreaker of Bletchley Park
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Re: Bill Tutte – The Lesser Known Codebreaker of Bletchley Park
#12Another interesting code breaker during WWII was the Swede Arne Beurling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arne_Beurling). He reverse-engineered the Sturgeon cipher from intercepted enrypted texts using pen and paper only, enabling Sweden to break the cipher systematically.
On the other hand, this had little impact on WWII as a whole, so it is not as important as the code breaking done at Bletchley park.
Re: Bill Tutte – The Lesser Known Codebreaker of Bletchley Park
#13I was fortunate to have dinner with him once when he visited our University (sadly, this was close to the time of his death). He was a pretty sweet old man. I recall he was very humble and a vegetarian. I had no clue he was so accomplished until I took a graph theory course in grad school!
Re: Bill Tutte – The Lesser Known Codebreaker of Bletchley Park
#14Don't forget about people who were breakine enigma 'before it was cool', and they succeed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_%28cryptography%29 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski .
True, but this story has nothing to do with Engima.
Can you please clarify what you mean?
Re: Bill Tutte – The Lesser Known Codebreaker of Bletchley Park
#15I was fortunate enough to hear Dr. Tutte give a talk in one of my undergraduate classes. It was Fall 2001 and I was a lowly undergrad at UW taking Math 249, the "advanced" requisite combinatorics course. I believe Dr. Tutte was a professor emeritus at the time and came to campus about once a week. Since our class was small, our prof asked us if we'd like to have Dr. Tutte give a talk. To be honest, I'd never heard about him before that, but the idea of having a math prof who helped fight Nazis come in was kind of awesome.
I still remember that talk to this day. The actual content of the talk was very interesting (he talked about his work at Bletchley Park, coming to Canada, his research at UW), but what has stuck most in my mind all these years was what I can only call his aura. Even at 80+ years old, he was a captivating speaker and all ~ 20 of us kids in that class were slack-jawed, hanging off our seat, listening to every word, in awe of him and what he did, especially since he wasn't that much older than any of us were when he did it.
I later did work with mesh parameterization and was delighted to find out that his work was considered seminal (the planar embedding theorem and the so called "Tutte weights"). He made a lot of contributions and published a lot of material, so I guess I shouldn't be so surprised that my area of research intersected with his. It was a nice feeling to be able to reference him though.
To his memory.
Re: Bill Tutte – The Lesser Known Codebreaker of Bletchley Park
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, but this story has nothing to do with Engima.
Can you please clarify what you mean?
The story about Bill Tutte has nothing to do with Enigma. Yes, Bill Tutte worked at Bletchley, and so did the code breakers who worked on Enigma.
But Tutte worked on Lorenz, and this story is about Tutte and his work, and hence this story is not about Enigma.
Re: Bill Tutte – The Lesser Known Codebreaker of Bletchley Park
#17Hear you can hear the man himself speak (RealPlayer and a lengthy boring introduction though, not for the impatient)
Re: Bill Tutte – The Lesser Known Codebreaker of Bletchley Park
#18I was fortunate enough to hear Dr. Tutte give a talk in one of my undergraduate classes. It was Fall 2001 and I was a lowly undergrad at UW taking Math 249, the "advanced" requisite combinatorics course. I believe Dr. Tutte was a professor emeritus at the time and came to campus about once a week. Since our class was small, our prof asked us if we'd like to have Dr. Tutte give a talk. To be honest, I'd never heard ab…
I was fortunate enough to go to Blethcley about ten-ish years back when the war time crpytanalysts were doing guided tours (do they still do that?). I forget the name of the bloke who escorted our group around, but it was well known in connection to the place.
Re: Bill Tutte – The Lesser Known Codebreaker of Bletchley Park
#19Don't forget about people who were breakine enigma 'before it was cool', and they succeed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_%28cryptography%29 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski .
while not Enigma related, Marian Rejewski and his colleagues, if I remember right, reconstructed physical Enigma (pre-war, 3 wheel) machines only from analysis of encrypted traffic, beating the French and English mathematicians working on the "enigma problem". it was pretty big and IMO comparable to Tuttes successes with Lorenz, it's annoying that history forgets Rejewski and his contributions so quickly.
Re: Bill Tutte – The Lesser Known Codebreaker of Bletchley Park
#20Don't forget about people who were breakine enigma 'before it was cool', and they succeed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_%28cryptography%29 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski .
while not Enigma related, Marian Rejewski and his colleagues, if I remember right, reconstructed physical Enigma (pre-war, 3 wheel) machines only from analysis of encrypted traffic, beating the French and English mathematicians working on the "enigma problem". it was pretty big and IMO comparable to Tuttes successes with Lorenz, it's annoying that history forgets Rejewski and his contributions so quickly.
More accurately, the British and French had not managed to make any progress decrypting the Enigma until the work of Rajewski and the Biuro Szyfrów was handed over to them due to the shifting political situation.