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I visited Bletchley for the first time less than a week ago and believe me, they waxed lyrical about the 3 polish mathmaticians. I've seen the memorial they have there. I came away feeling that it was a joint effort, but you have to remember that there were thousands of people working at Bletchley and Turing was key in the SPEED at which they were able to break the code by inventing the Bombe. If there's any mis-appropriation, it's not Bletchley's fault.


The first Bombe was built by the Poles and its design later given to the Brits. It was called the "Bomba Kryptologiczna", i.e. the "Cryptological Bomb" because of the amount of noise it made. Turing didn't invent the Bombe, his contribution was the improvements he made to vastly speed the process up.


And adding to the notion of teamwork and the critical importance of people in general and not just Turing we have the oft overlooked William Thomas Tutte [1], and Tommy Flowers [2] to remember. People seem to focus entirely on the Enigma decrypts and overlook the Lorenz cipher "Ultra" intelligence.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._T._Tutte

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer


That would have been my misunderstanding from what the tour guy said.




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