ALAN TURING
ABOUT
Born: June 23, 1912, Maida Vale, London
Died: June 7, 1954, Wilmslow
Education: Princeton University , King's College, Sherbone School, St Michaels School and The institute for advanced study
Siblings: John Turing
Claim to fame: His world war efforts and "cracking enigma"
Alan Turing is often called the father of modern computing. He was a brilliant mathematician and logician. He developed the idea of the modern computer and artificial intelligence. During the Second World War he worked for the government breaking the enemies codes and Churchill said he shortened the war by two years.
Born in London in 1912, Turing attended Sherborne School in Dorset and then, later, King's College Cambridge and Princeton University in the USA.
At the outbreak of World War Two, Alan Turing joined the Government Codes and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. He worked on breaking the code for the German Enigma machine, a device for sending coded messages to units of the German forces. Turing developed a machine (the Bombe) which helped break the code. He also went on to break the Naval Enigma, an even more complicated machine. His wartime services helped to win the war, but his work was so secret that very few people were aware of the importance of what he had done at Bletchley Park.
Turing went on to become deputy director of the computing lab at Manchester University.
He sadly died too young, in tragic circumstances, committing suicide after being arrested for gross indecency.
THE BOMBE
The bombe was an electromechanical device used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II. The US Navy and US Army later produced their own machines to the same functional specification, but engineered differently from each other and from the British Bombe.
The initial design of the bombe was produced in 1939 at the UK Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing. The engineering design and construction was the work of Harold Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company. It was a huge development from a device that had been designed in 1938 in Poland at the Biuro Szyfrów (Cipher Bureau) by cryptologist Marian Rejewski, and known as the "cryptologic bomb".
The bombe was designed to discover some of the daily settings of the Enigma machines on the various German military networks: specifically, the set of rotors in use and their positions in the machine; the rotor core start positions for the message and one of the wirings of the plugboard.
THE ENIGMA MACHINE
The Enigma machines were a series of electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines developed and used in the early- to mid-twentieth century to protect commercial, diplomatic and military communication. Enigma was invented by the German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I.
Early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services of several countries, most notably Nazi Germany before and during World War II. Several different Enigma models were produced, but the German military models are the most commonly recognised.
German military messages enciphered on the Enigma machine were first broken by the Polish Cipher Bureau, beginning in December 1932. This success was a result of efforts by three Polish cryptologists, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski, working for Polish military intelligence.
Rejewski reverse-engineered the device, using theoretical mathematics and material supplied by French military intelligence. Subsequently the three mathematicians designed mechanical devices for breaking Enigma ciphers, including the cryptologic bomb. From 1938 onwards, additional complexity was repeatedly added to the Enigma machines, making decryption more difficult and requiring further equipment and personnel—more than the Poles could readily produce.
On 26 and 27 July 1939, in Pyry near Warsaw, the Poles initiated French and British military intelligence representatives into their Enigma-decryption techniques and equipment, including Zygalski sheets and the cryptologic bomb, and promised each delegation a Polish-reconstructed Enigma. The demonstration represented a vital basis for the later British continuation and effort.
During the war, British cryptologists decrypted a vast number of messages enciphered on Enigma. The intelligence got lots of information from this source, codenamed "Ultra" by the British. It was a substantial aid to the Allied war effort.
Though Enigma had some weaknesses, in practice it was German flaws, operator mistakes, failure to systematically introduce changes in encipherment procedures, and Allied capture of key tables and hardware that, during the war, enabled Allied cryptologists to succeed.