Who was Alan Turing?
The Enigma
Alan Mathison Turing was born on June 23, 1912, in London, England. At a young age, he displayed signs of high intelligence, which some of his teachers recognized, but did not necessarily respect. When Turing attended the well-known independent Sherborne School at the age of 13, he became particularly interested in math and science. After Sherborne, Turing enrolled at King's College in Cambridge, England, studying there from 1931 to 1934. As a result of his dissertation, in which he proved the central limit theorem, Turing was elected a fellow at the school upon his graduation. Over the next two years, Turing studied mathematics and cryptology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1938, he returned to Cambridge, and then took a part-time position with the Government Code and Cypher School, a British code-breaking organization.
During World War II, Turing was a leading participant in wartime code-breaking, particularly that of German ciphers. He worked at Bletchley Park, the GCCS wartime station, where he made five major advances in the field of cryptanalysis, including specifying the bomb, an electromechanical device used to help decipher German Enigma encrypted signals. Shortly after World War II, Alan Turing was awarded an Order of the British Empire for his work.
The Enigma
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. Like other rotor machines, the Enigma machine is a combination of mechanical and electrical subsystems. The mechanical subsystem consists of a keyboard, a set of rotating disks called rotors arranged adjacently along a spindle, and one of various stepping components to turn at least one rotor with each key press. The mechanical parts act in such a way as to form a varying electrical circuit. When a key is pressed, one or more rotors move to form a new rotor configuration, and a circuit is completed. The Enigma transformation for each letter can be specified mathematically as a product of permutations.
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