Abraham Sinkov

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Abraham Sinkov

Abraham Sinkov (born 1907 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † January 19, 1998 in Mesa , Arizona ) was an American mathematician and cryptologist .

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Sinkov was the son of Russian emigrants, grew up in Brooklyn , where he attended Boys High School and studied mathematics at City College of New York (bachelor's degree) with his old school friend Solomon Kullback . Then he was a math teacher in New York.

Dissatisfied with his job as a teacher, he took part in the public service entrance exams like Kullback and received an invitation from William Friedman , the US chief cryptologist , in April 1930 . They were trained as cryptologists by him and became employees of the Signals Intelligence Service (SIS), a military department which at the time was primarily concerned with encrypting its own communications (Communications Security, COMSEC) and later increasingly with the decryption of foreign and hostile messages. Friedman also made sure they got military training at Fort Meade and enabled them to graduate in mathematics. Sinkov received his doctorate in 1933 under Francis Johnston at George Washington University (Families of Groups Generated by Two Operators of the Same Order).

With Kullback he initially had to provide his own encryption method. In 1936, Sinkov headed the United States' first listening post outside its territory in the Panama Canal Zone. In January 1941 he was a captain in a delegation that was supposed to exchange cryptological information with the British. During a visit to Bletchley Park they were informed (incompletely) about the successes in Enigma deciphering. Sinkov himself was active in the Pacific when the USA entered the war after Pearl Harbor . He was the unofficial head of the cryptographic service of General Douglas MacArthur in Melbourne , the CBB (Central Bureau), worked together in the Americans with Australians. They were able to effectively assist McArthur with his recaptures in New Guinea and the Philippines with deciphering work.

After the war, from 1949 he was head of communications security at the AFSA (Armed Forces Security Agency), which later became part of the NSA . When it was founded in 1952, he became head of COMSEC. In 1954 he attended the National War College and became director of production at the NSA. In 1962 he retired from the NSA and became a math professor at Arizona State University .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. MASTER CODE-BREAKER ABRAHAM SINKOV DIES obituary in The Washington Post , accessed October 13, 2019