Irving John Good (9 December 1916 - 5 April 2009) was a British mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing, and after the war continued working with Turing on computer design and Bayesian statistics at the University of Manchester before moving to the United States as a professor at Virginia Tech. Born Isadore Jacob Gudak to a Polish Jewish family in London, he anglicised his name and signed his publications I. J. Good, and served as a consultant on supercomputers to Stanley Kubrick for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Facts
AwardFellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics 2 AwardFellow of the American Statistical Association 2 FAQs
What did I. J. Good contribute to breaking German naval Enigma at Bletchley Park?
He spotted that German telegraphists favoured some dummy letters, a bias that became part of the Banburismus procedure.
Good started in Hut 8, Bletchley Park's facility for breaking German naval ciphers, on 27 May 1941. During a night shift he noticed that German telegraphists, when they added dummy letters to the trigrams they chose from the Kenngruppenbuch, tended to use some letters more than others. Because the codebreakers could work back from the indicators at the start of each message and try each bigram table in turn, a popular dummy letter pointed to the probably correct table. According to the article on him, this quickly became an important part of the Banburismus procedure. He later worked with Donald Michie in Max Newman's group on the Fish ciphers, which led to the development of the Colossus computer.
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Source Wikipedia: I. J. Good
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Source Wikipedia: I. J. GoodLead sentence 1Quote, Lead sentence 1
Irving John Good (9 December 1916 – 5 April 2009)
was a British mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing.
Sources
1. Wikipedia: I. J. Good
Lead section
Irving John Good (9 December 1916 - 5 April 2009) was a British mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing. After the Second World War, Good continued to work with Turing on the design of computers and Bayesian statistics at the University of Manchester.
Lead paragraph, sentence 2, birth name
He was born Isadore Jacob Gudak to a Polish Jewish family in London.
- In Group: Applied Cryptography, lead sentence: Irving John Good (9 December 1916-5 April 2009) was a British mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing.
In Field: Cryptography, Infobox: fields
Statistician, cryptologist
View the Source2. I. J. Good (Wikidata)
Wikidata P166: Smith's Prize
Wikidata P166 (award received): Smith's Prize.
Wikidata P166: Computer Pioneer Award
Wikidata P166 (award received): Computer Pioneer Award.
Wikidata P166: Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics
Wikidata P166 (award received): Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
Wikidata P166: Fellow of the American Statistical Association
Wikidata P166 (award received): Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
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