#cryptanalyst

Cyptanalyst Elizebeth Friedman and her team broke ~4,000 codes during WWII and brought down a Nazi spy ring by cracking an early version of the Enigma machine with only pen and paper. – WTF Fun Facts

A recent guest post on Language Log is an open letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson about the role of linguists versus cryptographers in Arrival: 

As fellow scientists, we linguists appreciate the work you do as a spokesperson for science. However, your recent tweet about the film Arrival perpetuates a common misunderstanding about what linguistics is and what linguists do:

In the @ArrivalMovie I'd chose a Cryptographer & Astrobiologist to talk to the aliens, not a Linguist & Theoretical Physicist

Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson), 1:40 PM – 26 Feb 2017

Though the term linguist is often used by the public to refer generally to anyone whose occupation is related to language (especially translators and interpreters), the type depicted in Arrival is a special kind of linguist who engages in the scientific study of human language: its structures, its uses, its underlying similarities, and its surprising diversity. A cryptographer simply cannot replicate the specialized training that a linguist like Louise Banks has, which takes years to learn and decades to master.

Most importantly, a cryptanalyst would likely be much less suited to the task of communicating with aliens than a linguist would (a cryptographer even less so, since they work on encryption, not decryption). Cryptanalysis relies on decrypting coded messages from a known language. If the source language and the encryption method are both unknown, ordinary cryptanalytic methods will fail. This is why the Native American code talkers of the 20th century were so invaluable to the US in both world wars: their languages were not understood by enemy cryptanalysts, so their encrypted versions could not be cracked, unlike with well-known languages like English.

Alan Turing

1912-1954

Today's your birthday...

Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist who is often called the "father of the modern computer". While he didn't invent the computer, he mathematically proved that computation was possible with a limited set of operations. He also conceptualized a "universal machine" that could solve any mathematical problem in symbolic form, later known as a "universal Turing machine". Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science.

Turing’s Delirium (Bolivia)

  Turing’s Delirium by Edmundo Paz Saldan is one of the books for my reading around the world challenge. Oh Boy, this book. This is book is set in the near or just alternative future where in Bolivia the president has decided to privatize all the utility’s in the country. The power structure is run by an American/Bolivian corporation that keeps raising the prices of electricity while power…