Computer Science Seminar Series
The History of Codebreaking, Part I: The Pre-Computing Era
January 31, 3:00pm
Weir Hall, Room 235
Presenter: Jason Hale
Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UM, and Manager of Research Support at the Mississippi Center for Supercomputing Research
For centuries, nations had sought military and diplomatic leverage by intercepting and decoding the messages of their enemies, while hiding and encoding their own. By WWII, the international stakes of cryptography had never been higher; nor had the challenges, thanks to the increasingly sophisticated mechanical designs of NAZI Germany's ENIGMA and Lorenz ciphers. The codebreaking efforts of allied soldiers, sailors, airmen, and especially allied mathematicians, including Alan Turing, would hasten both the end of the war, and the birth of the computing era. This presentation will offer just a taste of the intellectual problems and the tragic human episodes that marked that struggle.