5 ms·
"The documents also included the only known examples of Banbury sheets, a technique devised by the mathematician Alan Turing to accelerate the process of decryp
by rodgerd 12y ago
"The documents also included the only known examples of Banbury sheets, a technique devised by the mathematician Alan Turing to accelerate the process of decrypting Nazi messages. No other examples have ever been found."
Was the third paragraph too hard to reach?
- dang 12y ago> Was the third paragraph too hard to reach? This comment would be much better without that acerbic swipe. Please stay substantive.
- pbhjpbhj 12y agoThe structure and use of Banbury Sheets appears to have been well known prior to this discovery? TBH I'd say a specific piece of paper someone drew or wrote on isn't important if we know the content of that paper already; but I know many would disagree.
- Turing_Machine 12y agoWell, sure. Original, handwritten documents are almost always considered more valuable/important than nth-generation copies. E=MC^2 is going to be a lot more valuable in Einstein's handwriting than it is in this post. An original, signed Declaration of Independence or Magna Carta is a national treasure, but a printed copy won't be worth more than the cost of printing.
- xxs 12y agoAFAIK Einstein didn't write it actually as E=mc^2 but used square root instead.
- dalke 12y agohttp://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/E_mc2/www/ http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/E_mc2/www/ says the original, translated from German, was the text "If a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by L/c²", that is, m = L / c². L was used for energy at that time, instead of E. There is no square root. If you include the momentum term it's E²/c² - p² = m²c², which solving for E gives a square root, leading to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation .