Battle of wits
A million pages of new World War II codebreaking records have been released by the U.S. Army and Navy and the British government over the last five years. Now, Battle of Wits presents the history of the war that these documents reveal. From the battle of Midway until the last German code was broken in January 1945, this is an astonishing epic of a war that was won not simply by brute strength but also by reading the enemy's intentions. The revelations of Stephen Budiansky's dramatic history include how Britain tried to manipulate the American codebreakers and monopolize German Enigma code communications; the first detailed published explanations of how the Japanese codes were broken; and how the American codebreaking machines worked to crack the Japanese, the German, and even the Russian diplomatic codes. The compelling narrative shows the crucial effect codebreaking had on the battlefields by explaining the urgency of stopping the wolf pack U-boat attacks in the North Atlantic, the importance of halting Rommel's tanks in North Africa, and the necessity of ensuring that the Germans believed the Allies' audacious deception and cover plans for D-Day. Unveiled for the first time, the complete story of codebreaking in World War II has now been told.
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- For anyone interested in this stuff - “Battle of Wits” is a great book about cryptanalysis in WW2.
- Budiansky is a good writer: his "Battle of Wits" about WW2 Enigma cryptanalysis is worth reading, even though it is mostly rehashed from other sources. I'll probably try to check out this Gödel biography, though the mental illness angle sounds pretty bogus.
But it seems to me, we already have a perfectly good Gödel biography, "Logical Dreams" by John Dawson, who is himself a logician, catalogued Gödel's Nachlass which probably made him the world's foremost Gödel archivist, and was also one of the editors of Gödel's Collected Works (5 vols).
Obviously I haven't read the new book so I can't compare directly, but my Bayesian prior is that if you're going to read just one, go with Dawson's.
If you're more interested in understanding the incompleteness theorem and the great amount of nonsense and confusion surrounding it, try "Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse", by Torkel Franzén, reviewed here:
http://www.ams.org/notices/200703/rev-raatikainen.pdf
Dawson's biography of Gödel is reviewed here:
- To answer that would take an entire book! One book you might try is "Battle of Wits" by Stephen Budiansky, published in 2000 by The Free Press. ISBN: 0-684-85932-7
There was never a single break through at Bletchley. The Bombe machines (there were eventually many of them) were useful, but were just one part of the overall effort, and they did not always get results. The idea that all messages ended with "Heil Hitler!" is just wrong.
- Another factor (according to the excellent Battle of Wits by Budiansky) was that the Germans were overconfident that Enigma was unbreakable. Turned out their confidence in the hard computation that would need to be done to decode Enigma was wrong.
- Anyone who wants more of a history of WW2 crypto that extends the cast of characters beyond Turing (and the cast was significant and varied) should read "Battle of Wits" (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743217349) the historian who wrote it wrote it after a large NSA declassification in 1996.
What's even more extreme about the Polish codebreakers, a story you would read in Battle of Wits, is that they were evacuated from Poland to France after the invasion of Poland, and then stayed in occupied France working in secret for the Allies as part of the occupation government. They posed to the occupation government as the occupation governments signals intelligence system but secretly supplied GC&CS with information they intercepted from the continent (which the Allies had a lot of trouble doing only from the UK).
They did that for years, when they tried to evacuate themselves to Spain, a few of them were captured, interrogated, and did not give up the goods about either the invasion or the secret of Enigma. If you want wartime crypto heroes you would have a hard time doing better than Jerzy Różycki, Henryk Zygalski and Marian Rejewski.
- So this week I've been reading Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II by Stephen Budiansky.
The US intelligence community has a long history of going right to the communication source and obtaining raw data from public companies. In the 1920's Herbert Yardley's "American Black Chamber" worked with Western Union and other cable companies who turned over interesting cablegrams and radiograms.
In 1940 [before the US entered the second world war], the military assigned Lt Earl F. Cook to read and copy cable messages that passed through RCA's office with the consent of RCA's president, David Sarnoff.
After the war, there was of course project Shamrock.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_O._Yardley#The_American...
