Many original Polish papers were destroyed, but the mathematicians’ families have shared personal letters. After the war, military documents were scattered across Europe, and key French records were declassified only in 2016. The Poles shared their secrets with French and British intelligence services before and during the Second World War - the letters X, Y and Z were shorthand for the French, British and Polish codebreaking teams, respectively. In his book X, Y & Z, Dermot Turing, the great mathematician’s nephew, tells the gripping story of a band of Polish mathematicians who figured out much about how German Enigma encoding machines operated, years before Alan Turing did. But as with all breakthroughs, many more people laid the foundations.

Bletchley Park, UK - the secret centre where it all happened - rightly gained its place in history. This deluge of knowledge shortened the war. From 1940 onwards, Turing and his team engineered hundreds of electronic machines, dubbed bombes, which decrypted the thousands of missives sent by enemy commanders each day to guide their soldiers. The inspiration for a major motion picture starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, Alan Turing: The Enigma is a gripping story of mathematics, computers, cryptography, and homosexual persecution.X, Y & Z: The Real Story of How Enigma Was Broken Dermot Turing The History Press (2018)Īlan Turing’s crucial unscrambling of German messages in the Second World War was a tour de force of codebreaking. At the same time, this is the tragic account of a man who, despite his wartime service, was eventually arrested, stripped of his security clearance, and forced to undergo a humiliating treatment program-all for trying to live honestly in a society that defined homosexuality as a crime. The book also tells how this work was directly related to Turing's leading role in breaking the German Enigma ciphers during World War II, a scientific triumph that was critical to Allied victory in the Atlantic. Capturing both the inner and outer drama of Turing's life, Andrew Hodges tells how Turing's revolutionary idea of 1936-the concept of a universal machine-laid the foundation for the modern computer and how Turing brought the idea to practical realization in 1945 with his electronic design. This acclaimed biography of the founder of computer science, with a new preface by the author that addresses Turing's royal pardon in 2013, is the definitive account of an extraordinary mind and life. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the computer and artificial intelligence, and anticipated gay liberation by decades-all before his suicide at age forty-one.

Turing enigma book