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I once read a proof of Gödel's first incompleteness theorem that used a version of Turing's undecidability proof, which have had great impact on me. That being

• Retric 12y ago
  saving the world by decrypting the German Enigma machine this is often repeated but mostly incorrect statement. Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski cracked v1 of the enigma in theory. So, Brittan was provided with full pictures of the insides plus an approach to crack it by some polish mathematicians, but they needed to build some actual physical devices. Also, the enigma design continued to be improved upon over time, but the basic approach more or less continued to work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski PS: Remember home grown heroes get all the credit whatever their actual contributions.
  • cmdkeen 12y ago
    The four rotor enigma change the Germany Navy adopted though was a significant change - and the decryption of that was something Turing was heavily involved in. In 1942 the Battle of the Atlantic was far from undecided and without cracking the naval Enigma it is entirely possible that Britain would not have been able to effectively stay in the war, or send convoys to Russia.
    • dspillett 12y ago
      > was a significant change - and the decryption of that was something Turing was heavily involved in. It was still much more of a team effort than usually presented though. It does irritate slightly the way that people concentrate on the code cracking and Turing as it seems unfair in to directions: it forgets the other people who also contributed significantly, and pretty much ignores the significant work that Turning did do largely solo.
      • Florin_Andrei 12y ago
        It might be because Turing's groundbreaking theoretical work is beyond the realm of comprehension for the vast majority of people. There's only one person who became famous on the grounds that he's so great, almost nobody even understands what he's done - and that's Einstein.
        • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
          He did a lot. Everybody understands the simple stuff - matter and energy are the same thing - e=mc2
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    • busyant 12y ago
      I apologize for hijacking the thread, but this is a moderately interesting story. My father was a child in central Italy during WWII. He was about 8 years old when the Americans pushed the German line north of his home town in 1944. My father tells a story about how after the Germans were safely gone, he and his friends raided an abandoned German supply depot near his home. Inside, they found an unusual typewriter with built-in rotary dials. They had no idea what it was, and eventually they carried it to a nearby field and blew it up with explosives that they also stole from the depot. I have no idea if it was an Enigma machine, but it kind of fits the description. Also, this is a tremendous story that took place near his hometown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Sasso_raid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Sasso_raid). Unfortunately, the bad guys pulled off the daring raid. *edits for clarity and I think the year was '44, but I don't recall clearly anymore.
  • dreamweapon 12y ago
    You know, it's nice to be "correct" about history, to be grounded in actual facts, context, and all that good stuff. But you have to remember that at the end of the day, people greatly prefer to believe in, and see movies based on narratives -- especially hero narratives. And the more complex the hero is, and the more he/she suffers, the better. "Handsome-looking; persecuted or his sexuality; single-handedly wins WW II; then either commits suicide, is murdered, or accidentally poisons himself; not formally pardoned until decades later" is a great hero narrative. "Plain-looking; makes a seminal contribution whose impact won't be realize until much later; survives the war, goes home, becomes an accountant and never talks to anybody for 20 years", not so much.
    • Retric 12y ago
      Sure, and considering how little of recent history is accurate it seems reasonable to suggest the vast majority of 'history' as is generally understood is pure BS. But, oddly enough I find the actual stories more interesting because the made up narrative, being fiction, needs to seem believable where actual history can be really strange. EX: The Edward Snowden 'leaks' of NSA collecting phone record information was treated as a 'new' leak. However, such spying was common for other parts of the government to the point where apparently a drug lord used a one such database to clean house internally. So, phone records might be useful for finding terrorists, but there clearly useful for finding snitches.
    • j2kun 12y ago
      The fixes are minor and don't detract from the narrative. Instead of saying "Your universal machine that can compute anything," they could have said "Your universal machine that can compute anything that can be computed." No less impressive to someone who isn't listening to the details anyway, but true instead of false.
• mathattack 12y ago
  Yes - this stands up there with Neil Degrasse Tyson arguing that the Titanic had the stars wrong. :-)