Alan Turing was born on June 23rd, 1912 in London. He is the man who used statistical theory to crack the German’s Enigma machine in WWII. This machine encrypted the Nazi’s secret messages to one another so that the Allies could not understand those that were intercepted. As a boy, Turing attended boarding school at Sherborne School for independent boys in Dorset, England. He later attended King’s College at the University of Cambridge in 1931, and graduated three years later. One year after graduation, he became a Fellow at Cambridge for his incredible probability theory research. Turing also attended Princeton University, where he was mentored by Alonzo Church, an American professor who guided him while he earned his Ph.D. in mathematical…show more content… According to James Grime, it was so difficult to crack because, “inside, Enigma contained three moving parts, called rotors. These rotors would turn after pressing a key, making the wires of the circuit rotate, thus changing the circuit completely. So if you now pressed 'A' for a second time it may not be the same letter as before. Double letters, for example, may not become double letters in the code (Grime).” There were over 150 million million million daily possibilities. The machine that Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman developed could find that one possibility out of 150 million million million in 15 minutes. They called it the Bombe. “The Bombe worked using the mathematical principle of contradiction (Grime).” According to Stefan Kopieczek, “this device checked potential variations of the German Enigma code to determine which was being used in a given instance. The machine led to the comparatively easy deciphering of transmissions and arguably to the allied victory (Kopieczek).” After the war, Turing won the Order of the British Empire for deciphering over 84,000 secrets a month via the
