Irving John Good

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Irving John "Jack" Good (born  December 9, 1916 in London , † April 5, 2009 in Radford , Virginia , USA ), born Isidore Jacob Gudak , was a British mathematician and cryptologist . During the Second World War he contributed significantly to the deciphering of the German rotor key machine Enigma . In his publications he is almost always called I. J. Good , while he was mostly called "Jack" by his friends.

Life

IJ Good was born as Isidore Jacob Gudak into a Jewish family in the British capital, London , and was considered an early mathematical talent at school. From 1935 he studied mathematics at Jesus College in Cambridge, among others with AS Besicovitch and Hardy, and completed his studies in 1938. He then worked there for a while as a research assistant before moving to the Government Code and Cypher School ( GC&CS ) in 1941 , where he was able to complete his doctoral thesis . In GC & CS , there was a code name for the (then) top-secret military department which dealt in World War II successfully with the deciphering of the message traffic, the German military with their key machine encrypted Enigma. It was based in Bletchley Park, about 70 km northwest of London .

In "Hut 4" (photo from 2005) the decipherments from "Hut 8", in which I. J. Good worked, were evaluated militarily and tactically. Today the Bletchley Park Museum restaurant is located there.

In Bletchley Park, Good initially worked in Hut Eight (German: "Baracke 8") under the direction of Alan Turing on the deciphering of radio messages transmitted by the German Navy with the help of the Enigma-M4 in communications between the commander of the submarines (BdU ) and the German submarines operating in the Atlantic were encrypted . Later he joined Max Newman's group, which established the German telex connections (British code name : Fish ) with secret telex T52 and Lorenz key suffix SZ42 , from the British as Sturgeon (German: " Stör ", the Luftwaffe version) and Tunny (German: " Tunfisch ", the army version), cryptanalytically attacked. This led to the development of the world's first electronic calculator (computer) called the Colossus .

After the war, Good first worked at the University of Manchester , where he briefly worked on the university's own computer project, and then until 1959 again in secret work at the GC&CS . During this time he earned doctorates from both Cambridge and Oxford. In 1967 he emigrated to the United States , where he was a professor at the Technical University of Virginia (better known as Virginia Tech ) from 1967 to 1994 . There he chose the license plate "007 IJG" based on his time in Bletchley Park. He officially retired in 1994 .

Good was known for his work on statistics , especially Bayesian statistics, which he used together with Turing for deciphering work during World War II. In addition, he had published a large number of textbooks on probability theory . He is also considered to be one of the discoverers of the Fast Fourier Transform . Good also made a name for himself as a chess player (Cambridge chess master 1939) and contributed to making the board game Go , which is mainly known in East Asia, better known in Europe. Good himself had learned the Go rules from Alan Turing at the time.

He is also known as a visionary of Artificial Intelligence who introduced the concept of Intelligence Explosion as a Technological Singularity in 1965 . He was also a consultant for supercomputers to Stanley Kubrick in a 2001 film .

In 1962 he gave a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( A compromise between credibility and subjective probability ). In 1985 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Works (excerpt)

  • IJ Good: Probability and the Weighing of Evidence. Charles Griffin, London 1950.
  • IJ Good (Ed.): The Scientist Speculates. Heinemann & Basic Books, New York 1962.
  • IJ Good: The Estimation of Probabilities. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1965.
  • DB Osteyee and IJ Good. Weight of Evidence, the Singularity between Probability Measures and Signal Detection. In Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Springer-Verlag, New York 1974.
  • IJ Good: Good Thinking: The Foundations of Probability and Its Applications. Univ. of Minn. Press, Minneapolis 1983.
  • Jack Good: Enigma and Fish . In: Francis Harry Hinsley and Alan Stripp: Codebreakers - The inside story of Bletchley Park . Oxford University Press, Reading, Berkshire 1993, ISBN 0-19-280132-5 .
  • IJ Good: Early work on computers at Bletchley , Cryptologia April 1979
  • IJ Good: Turing's statistical work in World War II. In: Biometrika. Volume 66, 1979, p. 393 and in Turing Collected Works 1992

His list of smaller publications (2003) includes around 2400 entries.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Professor Jack Good
  2. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/apr/29/jack-good-codebreaker-obituary
  3. ^ Good: The interaction algorithm and practical Fourier analysis. In: Journal Royal Statistical Society. Volume 20, 1958, p. 361, quoted by Cooley / Tukey 1965 in their original work on FFT.
  4. ↑ Good, Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine, in Franz L. Alt, Morris Rubinoff (Eds.), Advances in Computers, Academic Press, 6, 1965, pp. 31-88
  5. ↑ List of publications ( Memento from February 19, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
personal data
SURNAME Good, Irving John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Good, IJ; Good, Jack; Gudak, Isidore Jacob (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British mathematician and cryptologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH April 5, 2009
Place of death Radford , Virginia , USA