Joseph E. Gillis

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Joseph E. Gillis (born August 3, 1911 in Sunderland , England , † November 18, 1993 in Rechovot , Israel ) was a British-Israeli mathematician and cryptanalyst .

Life

Joseph Gillis studied at Trinity College in Cambridge and received his doctorate in 1935 at the University of Cambridge for Ph.D. with his doctoral thesis "Some Geometrical Properties of Linearly Measurable Plane Sets of Points". During the Second World War he worked in the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) (German: "Staatliche Code- und Chiffrenschule") in Bletchley Park (BP), the military service that successfully deciphered German communications concerned. There he contributed significantly to the breakage of the German ENIGMA key rotor machine . After the war he went to Israel, where he became one of the founding fathers and professor of the mathematics faculty of the Weizmann Institute for Science .

With his question "Have you ever heard of the Trojan horse ?" He protected the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from using the captured German Enigma machines made available to Israel by the British shortly after the war (see also: Israeli Enigma ) whereby the British could possibly have "read" the encrypted Israeli communications .

Joseph Gillis was married to Olga Kirsch and had two daughters. He died at the age of 82.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Joseph Gillis in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English). Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  2. ^ Gordon Welchman: The Hut Six Story - Breaking the Enigma Codes . Allen Lane, London 1982; Cleobury Mortimer M&M, Baldwin Shropshire 2000, p. 11. ISBN 0-947712-34-8
  3. ^ BP Roll of Honor (English). Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  4. Nazi Enigma encryption machine may have been used by Britain to spy on Israel ynet news (English). Retrieved November 10, 2016.
  5. When the British gave away unsafe enigmas to Israel, Klausi's crypto column. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  6. ^ Obituaries in The New York Times (English). Retrieved November 8, 2016.