HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015901.jpg

It is 1943 and a small group of Polish mathematicians sit, ears glued to their wireless set, waiting to hear whether the German army will advance on Warsaw. The Polish Intelligence Bureau badly needed to know what the German army was planning and had recruited this group of young mathematicians as code breakers. Up to this point, code-breaking had been the domain of linguists able to see word patterns in apparently random sets of letters. The arrival of electro-mechanical machines made this method redundant, and code-breaking had become the domain of mathematical minds. The British, French, and American intelligence agencies were all hard at work deciphering the German codes, but only the Polish group, motivated by the imminent threat of invasion, had made real progress. The code they were breaking: ‘Enigma’.

As with many inventions, Enigma got off to a difficult start. The inventor, Arthur Scherbius, tried to sell it to the army but they rejected it saying it did not provide any real military benefit. Instead, the machine went into service transmitting commercial shipping manifests. However, some senior figures in the German military had not forgotten the lesson of the First World War. During that war, the German army suffered major setbacks because the British broke all their codes early on. With the onset of World War II, Rommel ordered the German Army and Navy to deploy modern coding machines. The previously rejected Enigma was rapidly pressed into service and, all of a sudden, Europe went dark to Allied Intelligence. The man to lead the task of breaking Enigma for the English was Alan Turing.

Alan Turing
Alan Turing was conceived in India but born in London in early 1912. He was precocious from an early age and an extraordinarily determined character. His first day at Public School, Sherborne in Dorset, coincided with the British General Strike of 1926. With no public transport available, the thirteen-year-old Turing cycled the 60 miles to school, staying in a guesthouse on the way and earning a write-up in his local newspaper. Turing went on to study Mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge and was made a Fellow at only 22. In 1936 Turing, aged 24, published On Computable Numbers and their Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, not a snappy title, but one of the most influential mathematical works of the 20th century. The paper described the new the science of computing and solved Hilbert’s ‘Entscheidungsproblem’, a mathematical puzzle

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015901